Christmas City Competition BBQ team

It's a Christmas tradition in these parts: Santa hitches the flying pigs to his magic barbecue and takes to the skies.

At every house they pass, Santa frees one of his wonderful pigs, who tumbles down the chimney, incinerating himself in the fireplace. Oh, don't worry! These are miracle pigs; they regenerate endlessly, until every home on Earth has a dead pig of its own!

Which is why the pigs are every bit as jolly as Saint Nick. On this night, they get to die eternally (well, a billion or so times each), again and again, reconstituted above the rooftops and readied once more for death.

Ho ho ho!

Take a moment to visit the ghosts of suicidefood Christmases past—2010, 2009, and 2007.

Pleasantville Pig Out

Compare if you will the name Pleasantville with the gruesomely spot-on barbecue-related town names we've seen in the past, like Boiling Springs Lake and Hardball Farms. While those toponyms put it all out there—the pain, the anguish—Pleasantville is coy. Pleasant. Does this look pleasant?

The pig in his barbecue grill jail, the flames swelling at his back—that's pleasant?

Well, for him, it probably is. We lost our heads for a minute. This isn't one of our scheduled Festivals of Cruelty, wherein the animals are truly terrorized and hounded to the brink of death and beyond.

This is party time. The animals are honored guests, proud for the chance to die and experience the oblivion they've spent their lives pursuing.

Sauced Pigs Bar-B-Que

We love animals-as-food punning. Ask anyone. (Exhibit A, and Exhibit B.)

These two pigs are sauced, you see—drunk on the glory of their impending deaths. They're also sauced, as in slathered with flavor-enhancing goop.

Either way, we can see they're feeling no pain. (That part comes later.) Right now, it's all about camaraderie, happy wishes for an eventful future, and the profound satisfaction that comes from fulfilling one's dearest wishes. That they can experience their blossoming present and fructifying future together is icing on the cake. Or more like barbecue sauce on the hunk of pig meat.

Of course, the one on the right looks like he's had a touch too much camaraderie and reminiscing about the paltry pleasures of living.

Addendum: More sauce-related wordplay, this time courtesy of a decapitated pig head wreathed in a bandanna of fire.

Cubby's Q

Cubby is angry.

Angrily, he endorses his eponymous line of "killer" pig ribs while angrily holding aloft a killer barbecue fork.

We're not sure what Cubby's got to be so angry about. After all, he's orchestrated this entire enterprise according to his own scheme. If he doesn't like it, he could just leave the gigantic cowboy hat behind and assume a life of quiet dignity.

So we know he's right where he wants to be: hawking ribs by the platterful, in the hopes that one day it'll be his ribs up there.

Maybe that's what's got him so mad, the knowledge that it's always someone else's turn, some other pig's chance to sacrifice his meat and bones for the "good" of humanity. What about Cubby? When is it his turn? He has a restaurant, he has standing in the community, he has a set of custom-made overalls. So why not him?

In time, Cubby. In time. Until then, content yourself with the thought that your anger is the secret ingredient that'll make you one memorable meal.

 

Mainely Grillin' & Chillin'

Lobster: Say, when you think about the Raitt Homestead Farm's Mainely Grillin' & Chillin' Country BBQ State Championship, what's the first thing that comes to mind?

Pig: Hard to say, Lob. I guess the grilling? Or maybe the chilling?

Lobster: They're both important aspects of the G&C festivities, that's for sure. But aren't you forgetting something?

Pig: No, I don't think...

Lobster: Come on, Pig. What's the best part? The Reason for the Season?

Pig: Um...

Lobster: There's the grilling. The chilling. And the...?

Pig: The killing!

Lobster: Now you got it!

Pig: If it weren't for us getting killed, none of the rest of it would be worth a darn.

Lobster: Too true.

Pig: And the spilling. Spilling our blood?

Lobster: Sure, I guess.

Pig: And the willing? Like, making out your will?

Lobster: Yeah, but it's not like we own anything to give away. It's borrowed time all the way! We can't even claim ownership of our bodies.

Pig: There's the Adirondack chairs, too. Can't forget them.

Lobster: They make the chilling so much easier.

Pig: To us!

Lobster: To us!

*clink!*

Pig on the Pond

There once was a pig. There was a pond, too, but we're interested in the pig.

The pig had a dream. Unless you're three weeks old, you already know what the pig's dream was. The pig's dream was to get eaten. If he could bob around on an inner tube for a while beforehand, that would be gravy. 

So, the pig did what any pig with a purpose would do: He dedicated himself to the quest for culinary knowledge, enrolled in a pig-fattening class, and got himself fitted for a pair of swim fins.

All the pieces were falling into place. As he drifted off to sleep every night, he warmed himself with thoughts of his future, a future that offered itself to him like a big old plate of pig meat all dripping with, you know, "juice."

And after all that work… nothing happened. The pig floated from one end of the pond to the other, and no one so much as stabbed him with a fork.

Now, the average pig would have been so discouraged he might have given up completely on the idea of being killed and eaten in a superfluous festival of carnivory. But this pig was no average sacrifice. 

He didn't quit. 

No, he redoubled his efforts.

He got himself an advanced degree in Dying Studies and tried again. 

He'd give them something to shoot for. (And, hell, maybe even something to shoot at. He wasn't going to rule out anything!)

Slathering himself with BBQ 30 (ha ha?), he mounted his inner tube and took to the pond once more. Who could resist such an educated pig? He had achieved the pinnacle of academic excellence! He had finally become somebody. Just in time to become nobody.

(Coincidentally—we can only assume—the 2011 Pigs on the Pond event was designed to raise money for schools.)

Uncle Piggy Smokey Grill

We can't be sure, but Uncle Piggy sure seems like a pig with a terrible secret.

We don't pretend to know all the details, but if we had to hazard a guess, we'd say it involves his eating all the stuff you threw on the grill a few minutes ago. (See him patting his belly?)

And then there's his, well… His personal issues. It's not exactly well known outside the world of suicidefood, but cannibalism and his own impending demise have joined forces to inflame inside him an unquenchable paraphilia.

His shirt's already off, and he crosses his legs provocatively. He wants you to want him. He is making bedroom eyes at you from atop the grill. Oh, he'll make you cry Uncle.

And with that, we're off to see our therapist. Until next time!

Fighting Cock Kentucky Bourbon Brand Barbecue Sauce

Over the years, the animals have granted us a taste of many flavors of madness. Their deathwishes are as varied as all creation. For many animals, of course, the urge to die is primal and ineffable. It just is. As real, as fundamental as a genome, the drive to succumb to oblivion's gentle caress is inherent in the very act of being an animal.

The lesser-known imperative, second only to this basic impetus, is to serve. Oh, we have seen the many forms this service has taken: To please, to pay tribute, to titillate, to secure for oneself the blessings of humans' crumbs, of their attention, of their favor.

We've even seen animals sacrifice themselves to improve the sex lives of their (barely) betters.

But with this Fighting Cock Kentucky Bourbon Brand Barbecue Sauce, we discover a whole new reason to die!

"C'mon," the bottle commands, "singe a few tailfeathers... unless you'd rather stay in the henhouse."

The animals are lining up before the blade so that you can prove your manhood, an opportunity that concerns them greatly. If they can't be eaten by the manly, they'd just as soon—shudder—go on living.

BBQ Trophies

You are looking at a bunch of true believers. This Unholy Trinity has fully embraced their status as food. They have totemized themselves, solidifying their very objectness.

The point is that these animals have so thoroughly assimilated the very concept of their own worthlessness that they can appear—excited, eager, with fond wishes for a future constituting more of the same—as living embodiments of others' desires to eat them.

They do not merely offer their blessings on an endeavor dedicated to their destruction; they ratify the worldview and priorities of their destroyers. And so the cow represents herself as beef and the pig as ribs. They are just (temporarily) living stuff.

It is a curious phenomenon, this use of the animals' agency to reaffirm their lack of agency. Curious, but altogether commonplace.

Then again, it should hardly surprise us when animals this warped fail to appreciate the difference between prize-winner and prize.

Cohoctah Cook'n

It's the wistful side of suicide food. This pig's heart is about to burst. Look at his eyes. You can practically feel the pain in those big, heavy-lidded eyes. He wants so much. The yearning is written all over his face. His ears hang down, symbolic of his downcast soul. He suppresses a tear. When he's alone, those tears will flow. His sorrow will emerge, tentatively, so afraid is the pig of the mockery he has come to regard as his due.

To be put to work, managing the grill, while his dreams are elsewhere. Not far away, no, but elsewhere. 

Stuck behind the scenes, as it were, tending to the actors, he longs to be on the stage. It should be him crisping above the coals! It should be him sizzling, as his cooking flesh exudes its precious freight of fat! It should be him filling the skies with his smoke!

But they've got him standing behind a board (?), his "hands" alongside his, um, pointy fingernails—look, we're not clear on his anatomy at all—so he can watch. So he can eat his heart out.

But if he wants to be near, to have one foot in that glorious world of dead pigs, this is where he needs to be. Bitter as it is, this is the choice he must make. And always, in the shadowed cell of his mind, the thought resounds: Maybe one day....

Thighs-N-Pies

She's got thighs—has she ever!—and she's got pies. Put them together, and she's got thighs-n-pies. While this image scores high on the Truth in Advertising Meter, it does raise a vexing issue.

Namely, does this lipsticked chicken in Daisy Dukes have pies in the same way she has thighs?

We think not. The pie is an item she holds aloft. When she shows it off to you, she's inviting you to select it from the menu. But when she struts and shows off those long legs, she's inviting you to select it from her body.

When you tell your server you'd like the Smoked Chicken Thighs (Hot, BBQ, or Mild), the chicken steps out back for a rendezvous with the cleaver. Which, apparently, is what's in it for her.



Addendum: When it comes to Pies 'n Thighs, a similarly named establishment, it's the pies that receive top billing. And among the wide assortment of pre-dead animals clamoring for you attention, there is, surprisingly, no leggy chicken hoping to catch you eye.

Lord of the Ribs

At first we weren't sure whether Tolkien's timeless epic translated well to the world of barbecue. We knew the chicken was Gandalf, the cow was cast as a man of the Second Age (Elendil, presumably), and the pig was some Second Age elf (Elrond or Gil-galad, we assumed), but it all felt contrived. Not as contrived as other barbecue-related stretches we've encountered, to be sure, but where were they going with this? If the One True Rib promised to enslave the free peoples of Middle Earth, then our protagonists want to destroy it? And that's going to sell pig meat?

Then we realized we were looking at it all wrong. We were seeing the details but missing the big picture. For what is J. R. R.'s tale about? Beyond the comings and goings of bearded weirdos and a bunch of business about a giant, evil eyeball, it's a story about brotherhood and sacrifice. Brotherhood and sacrifice? That's the hallmark of modern "food" animals!

It all made sense! Who knows more about sacrifice and selflessness than cows, pigs, and chickens? Who is better suited to hit the battlefield of Dagorlad—also known as the backyard barbecues of North America—and offer themselves up for their friends? In this respect, all the animals are Sam Gamgees, bearing all our burdens, long-suffering, never questioning our motives or intentions.

Epilogue: Five minutes later it stopped making sense again.

Absolutely BBQ

Don't be distracted by the wild-eyed cowboy with the tongs and the flags. (What's he up to with his French and UK flags? Full disclosure: We don't care.)

The real story, as always, is the pig. The pig with the smile, the inviting eyes, and the spit rammed the length of its body. Whatever goes on around it, no matter the cultural significance of the celebration of which he is the centerpiece, the pig has simple needs easily met: hot steel, hot coals, and a hot old time. If only we all had such humble requirements! If only life were so accommodating to us as it is to pigs. It's almost as if the entirety of existence—the very Way of Things—were set in order specifically with the needs of pigs in mind.

And we thought we occupied the center of the world's turning! It's the pigs! It's all for them! Don't envy them their satisfaction. One day we'll all be just as dead.