Beguiling Chicken Skin

Reminiscent of the exalted Rachachuros Seasoning chicken, this glorious monstrosity served up by the New York Times art department bursts upon the scene, an audacious example of myth-making!

As the Times says: "There are white-meat people and there are dark-meat people; there are those who swear by the drumstick, thigh or breast. And then there are skin people."

Here, then, is the patron saint of the Skin People, a carefree scaffolding of chicken skin, otherwise known as a dead, plucked, headless, and footless chicken. It used to be a bird, but it has become so much more. A symbol! A figurehead! The emblem of a new identity! What started as a mere living thing has parted the veil surrounding the eternal and become the apotheosis of a New Discipline.

This politico-religious icon, this beguiling provider of multifariously edible skin, this let-me-just-slip-out-of-something-more-comfortable charmer is part-vixen, part-apostle. Nothing could be more familiar to the lusty despoilers of animals!

European Fur Breeders' Association

The industrious European fur breeders of the European Fur Breeders' Association need to learn to dial it back just a bit. A smidgen less... enthusiasm would serve them well. We're uncomfortable giving them pointers, but their videos look like hoaxes or something we might have cooked up just to make the EFBA's position look even worse.

We've seen footage before where animals speak about their yearnings and their fears in their own voices, and, far from grounding us in a comforting reality, they only make our skin crawl and our bowels loosen. What begins as an attempt at cinéma vérité becomes cinéma putréfié, as the cognizant beings patiently explain their eagerness to die.

Fred the mink gets the ball rolling.

"...nice farmers and vets take care of us," he says—and they sure do take care of them!—"and we are useful to people!"






And then things get a little personal when Fred points out the real value of his friends Simone the chicken and Lola the cow:

Where the EFBA's little videos compound the insanity is in their central, axiomatic proposition that because raising and killing animals for their meat is ordained by the animals themselves, there can be no legitimate objection to raising and killing animals for their fur. It's logic so simple even (only?) a child could embrace it!














After all, there's no difference...














(Thanks to Dr. Mrs. Suicidefood for the referral.)






Addendum: If you really need to watch one of these videos, knock yourself out.

Addendum 2: Enjoy a suicide-clothing digression from four and a half years ago.

JWT Salt Lick BBQ at SXSW

We could go about investigating the confluence of forces that led to this phantasmagoria (an ad agency, a barbecue joint, and a music conference), but that would just detract from the insanity on display.

The basics are, well, basic: A cow and a pig advertise barbecue by repeatedly killing and eating each other and themselves. If that's all it was, we'd be out of here in five minutes.

But where other outfits are content delivering stale homilies about service, dedication, and self-destruction, these guys give us a tour de force of gore and depravity!

And what makes it even more chilling is the animation's reliance on the tropes of childhood. It's Wes Craven meets Sesame Street, a pairing that only the joined psychoses of barbecue, advertising, and rock 'n' roll could have conjured.











Pigs eagerly grate themselves to pulp on a monstrous playground slide. Aboard a pogo-stick, another pig bounces into a bonfire and then a barrel of barbecue sauce.

A cow slices herself into quivering slabs of flesh with a wire jumprope.

Childhood has become a nightmare! Freedom has become a nightmare! And play and leisure—nightmares. Living itself has become a nightmare! And the animals frolic gaily through the nightmare landscape, their only sadness born of the knowledge that their suffering must someday come to an end.

(Thanks to Dr. David for the referral.)









Addendum: If you must.

Skewering Training Center

Who will be the best skewered food item? Will it be the bell pepper for the third year in a row, or will the upstart onion make its mark?

What's this? Two new competitors have entered the Skewering Training Center*, and they mean business.

The chicken and pig have fire in their eyes and steel in their hearts, and—if all goes well—they'll soon have a giant skewer running through their abdomens.

They're obviously quite pleased with their performance, and well they should be. Never have animals been impaled on a skewer so skillfully, their internal organs so neatly perforated, their peritoneums so thoroughly punctured.

Vegetables can't hope to compete with thinking, feeling, pain-suffering creatures. How could inanimate objects throw themselves onto sharp rods with anything like this kind of style?

Look at them smiling, arms upraised in triumph. You can do it, chicken and pig! We believe in you! Years from now, when people think of the joy of being well and truly stabbed clean through, they'll think of you!

(Thanks to Dr. Daniela for the referral and the photo.)






*This is actually what this was (actually) called.

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.

Au Pied de Cochon, Montreal

In the finest tradition of haute cuisine a pig lops off his head and displays it to a roomful of potential customers.

See, things work differently in the chi-chi restaurants populating Suicidefoodland.

In any other region a decapitated hog would be expected to put diners off their feed. But in this depraved district the ghastliest of ghastlies are tolerated so long as the muddied, bloodied beasts give the okay.

And this one isn't complaining! No, monsieur! Ever the serveur professionnel, he is thrilled to death. Literally! To death and beyond, in fact.

So delighted is he to know that his clientele will dine so well, dipping spoons, perhaps, into the congealing consommé of his neckhole, that not even his own grisly beheading can put out his fire.

Still, the waiter/entrée must be distracted (by joy, maybe?), for he's holding aloft his tete, not his pied. C'est la vie. As long as he's happy.

(Thanks to Dr. Chris for the referral.)

Bodega González

It's like the world's most famous pig and this diabolical ham are having a suicide-off!

His hand on his hip—a casually spiteful gesture—he slices and slices.

Slivers of his long-ago-living flesh slowly fill the platter, and his leer only becomes more and more unnerving. Just who is he avenging here? Who is the target of his rage and self-loathing? Is he giving himself what he imagines he deserves, or is it all about you? Is he trying to show you just how much you've hurt him?

We could never hope to tease apart the tangled threads of his dysfunctional motivation, but we do know it's been a good long while since we've seen a ham with this much raw, seething anger.