Le Cornichon

If you're like most sex-crazed monsters bent on the destruction of everything sensible minds hold dear, when you think of fine French cuisine, you think of goosewomen offering up their legs for your consumption.

Like a cross between the Martini Bitter ads and the horrors of Rachachuros, this lovingly crafted portrait of a buxom half-goose, half-Marie Antoinette simultaneously titillates and shames.

She sits in her boudoir, waiting for us, petticoats splayed to bare those long, long legs, luxuriously anticipating the moment when we come to her, predatory gourmands, eyes alight with longing, hunger straining our nerves, and hack off her leg and eat it.

It's such a welter of conflicting themes it could occupy a cadre of psychoanalysts for months. Bestiality, cannibalism, good old-fashioned suicidefoodist denial: they all jostle for space in a scrum of specious propositions.

Is she woman? Is she goose? Is she food? She's all three, a feathered, smooth-skinned, avian, bosomed entrée! Her gleaming shoes are even garnished with parsley!












Lest you think Le Cornichon cares only for sexualized food, these images remind us that the suicidefoodist's reach extends farther than regal floozies.

Figures from history, figures bespeaking the finer things—these too can be coaxed into the same paradoxical machine, which can anthropomorphize and dehumanize at the same time.

And so, Napoleon is recast, improbably, as a squid (one with the erroneous, dumbbell-pupiled eye of an octopus) and a vintner as a rooster.

The artisan, the emperor, the princess all wish to be like you—to be better than you!—and also to be cast down in your sight as mere stuff.