Animals Aren't Even Things: a digression

We've discussed the Doctrine of Inanimacy several times. It holds that animals, being mere objects, are beneath our moral consideration. Contrary to everything you have witnessed yourself, animals don't think or feel. Hell, they don't really do anything.

Of course, the bizarre part is how this concept—animals' status as nothing more than matter—so often nestles alongside suicidefoodism's foundational principle. Namely, that animals are so like us, with dreams and desires that resonate so strongly in us because they so closely mirror our own. They want to belong, to amount to something, to receive approval.

It's the central paradox of the Movement: that which should serve to create psychological distance actually inspires intimacy, and that intimacy inspires contempt. Look, it's a giant, steaming stew of contradictory impulses, and trying to understand it will only give you wrinkles.

Our point here isn't to understand. Instead, we'd like to look at something that denies even the Doctrine of Inanimacy, something that says individual animals aren't even things, something that would have actual animals vanish into sheer abstraction.

This photo is from the October 31, 2011 edition of The New York Times. It accompanied a story in The New York Times Magazine about a "farmer" hoping to do something or other with fancy meat.

Whatever.

Before you go any farther, take a look at the thing under the man's arm. If you're like us, you might have thought that object was a piglet.

You would have been wrong. The caption explains the true nature of the photo:

"Brock with one of his heritage breeds—the start of a grand culinary reclamation project."

And just like that—poof!—the pig has been rendered invisible. For the man isn't holding an individual animal, or even a physical thing! He is holding a breed, and not even one that occupies its own place in the natural order. No, it's one of the man's breeds! The pig can't even claim its own lineage, its own existence. It's as though chattel was too good for the pigs, and they had to be reduced to airy concepts.

Deny if you will that pigs are intelligent and you are uninformed. Deny if you will that pigs are sentient and you are blind. But deny that they are physical things and you are a madman.

I Wish I Were an Oscar Mayer Wiener: a digression

For more than 45 years, a suicidefoodist earworm has been wriggling across the airways of the world. It involves stuff made from "food" animals, but the targets of its warped philosophy are... children. Human children. So enshrined in our collective unconscious is this message that it belongs with the Suicide Food Emeriti we honored in May of 2007.

What helps it rise above the dregs of advertising's sump is the flagrant insanity of its premise:

Beyond animals wishing to die so that they may find meaning in being eaten, this is children wishing—and lofting their wishes to a mindless pantheon—to be dead animals so that they may find meaning in being eaten. These kids, they've mastered the subjunctive mood (all that "I wish I were" stuff), but the basics of self-preservation and self-respect elude them.

"Oh, I'd love to be an Oscar Mayer wiener.
That is what I'd truly like to be!
'Cause if I were an Oscar Mayer wiener
Everyone would be in love with me!"

So hungry are they for acknowledgment from a society blind to their existence that they would be transformed into animals, butchered, extruded into mildly seasoned meat products, grilled, and placed on buns. If that's what it takes to receive love at last, they'll do it!

In the classic commercial from 1965, one demented boy refuses to go along with the crowd of would-be martyrs. He has no wish to die, but he is soon bullied back into the fold.

Addendum: We assume you can find examples of this death march on your own. But how about a short video on the making of the jingle?

Suicide Horses: a digression

It's been a long while since our last sports-related digression, and we're not sure what took us so long. Because this tradition has been around long enough to have merited attention before now. The event is the World Famous Suicide Race, a cherished part of the annual Omak (Washington) Stampede, wherein riders and horses race down a 62-degree slope and into Okanogan River, swim about 100 yards, and then charge up a 500-yard incline.

Why is this colorful equestrian pageant called that, you may wonder. The spectacle has been around since the mid 30s, and from 1984 to the present, at least 20 horses have died from injuries sustained during the race.

What slots this right alongside our usual niche is that word, suicide. See, the horses choose this dangerous sport and make it their own. They volunteer for it. Their human partners honor the horses' wishes, helping to make their dreams come true.

So when they crash down Suicide Hill and tumble into the water… Well, after all, this is what they wanted.

(Image source: IDA USA.)

What We've Been Missing 6: a digression

From time to time, on stumbling feet made careless by regret, we visit the culinary heights we have forsworn. (Our most recent installment of similar bounty, from nearly a year ago, is here.) What riches could our tongue be sampling! What delights for the eye and palate! Instead of these clever morsels, to content ourselves with such paltry, dirt-grown fare. When we could be tasting all of this!

Like these swollen joints, these bloated, bulbous, stuffed, and ruptured pipkes!

Or this Hawaiian... stuff. It's called kālua pork, meaning that it's cooked in an underground oven. Special wood is burned in a pit, stones are added for heat retention, and the pit is lined with banana leaves. Then the meat is added, covered with more leaves, burlap, and sand, and the whole thing cooks for hours and hours.


When the result is as scrumptious (?) as the image to the left, it's clearly worth all the trouble.

 Presentation is everything.

The simplest things are sometimes the most tempting. Such as these slabs of canned meat fried atop a tough, rubbery skin of scrambled eggs and topped with viscous ketchup!

Suicide Art: a digression

As you know—even children know it!—animals want to die to enrich our lunches. And our wardrobes, our leisure time, our medicine chests, and our decrepit cultural institutions. And other things besides.

We've seen them all, all the ways animals are dying to serve us by serving up themselves. The July 3, 2011, edition of The New York Times Magazine suggests one that escaped our reeling imagination: art. Yes, we can now assume animals enjoy dying for our art.

In a piece titled "Among the Piglets," by Randy Kennedy, we learn about what Peter Nadin, onetime leading light of the intellectual New York City art circuit, has been up to lately. And what he's been up to is farming. We learn about how his experiences on the land have led him back to art. But we're not the only ones inspired. The animals are pretty darn happy about it, too! One of his projects is the artistic drying and curing of "a half-dozen mold-covered hams." Says Mr. Nadin, whether about his artistic or agrarian pursuits, we're not quite sure:

The pigs, for their part, might not agree that it's such a good thing to have happen, I suppose. But it seems to me like a pretty noble end, all in all. I wouldn't mind being eaten, you know? Meet your end in the forest somewhere and the coyotes and other animals eat your body? In fact, I think it would be quite a dignified way to go.

Almost as nobly dignified, we would venture, as having your entire life taken over by some artist who wants to make you his property, kill you, and make supper or art out of you.

Suicide Barnyard: a digression, part 2

A year and a half ago, we presented a letter printed in the New Yorker that reminded us all how much animals on loving farms enjoy their lot. Well, in the magazine's June 13/20 issue, a Ms. G. of Ashland, Oregon, has a similar message for us:

Placing a value on the existence of cows, sheep, pigs, and chickens as both edible and sentient beings gives them species-appropriate lives, albeit with a scheduled death. (Emphasis added, because that's plain weird.)

In other words… Oh, shoot. We lost it.

It's a squirrely thing, this idea.

No, wait. It's like this: The animals are better off when people think of them as walking foodstuffs—this is opposed to supporting the bioengineered ("vat") meat industry waiting in the wings, an industry that would eliminate the need for actual animals.

Because see, um…

Because if animals are nothing but commodities, then, even though, sure, someone else will control every aspect of their existence and their "scheduled" deaths, at least the animals will be granted "species-appropriate" lives. And who's deciding what's appropriate? Why, the people making all the decisions and doing all the killing, of course!

Hey, Ms. G. is just telling you how the animals see it. They are thankful for the opportunity to live and die at your pleasure. Like the most sycophantic subjects of the cruelest tsar, the animals live and die to serve.

Anchor Butter: a dairy digression

The girls down at Anchor Butter are just a bunch of working stiffs, like you and me, taking well deserved pride in the fine product they help bring to market.

The successive artificial inseminations! The endless chain of babies torn from their sides! All cheerfully endured for the sake of their company's flagship commodity.

The most salient point: the cows are not mere objects—they are proper subjects, actors on their behalf, agents in their own right. Can an object drive a tractor? Ha!








Or churn butter to exacting standards? Or manage a hand truck? Absurd!

Touching on a loathsome but little-discussed theme—that of livestock as valued employees—this depiction of a shift at Anchor Butter is really just a snapshot, a day-in-the-life catalog of animal liberation.

Exploited underclass? No more than any other wage-earner! Captive property? Nothing could be further from the truth!

The cows are making the butter! They're calling the shots! The humans (chuckle chuckle) work for them!

(Thanks to Dr. Vez for the referral and the photos.)

Addendum: Revisit our most recent dairy digression.

What We've Been Missing 5: a digression

Oh! Had we but known! Had we but received a glimpse of the gustatory ecstasies that could have been ours! We would have laid down our life's path among different lands. When this mood strikes us, we can't help looking on with longing at what might have been. And so, salivating, we put together lists like this one, our love letters to a limitless world of pleasures now closed to us.

As always, the food depicted here was prepared by professionals. Hard as that might be to believe.

(Our most recent installment.)

They call this one the Mousetrap Special.








Ribs have never tempted so cunningly. See the meat there, shed from its confining bones, freed from its bodily prison. Liberated! How it frolics!












When you process dead animals thoroughly—and we mean thoroughly—you are left with something that can only be called, um… substance. This can of textureless stuff, this tin of anonymous material—this meat, this "food"—represents the endpoint on life's dreariest journey.











Now this has got to be the most effective quit-smoking campaign we've seen in a long time!

What's that?

Excuse us a minute.

(You say that's not a smoker's tarry lung arranged for some reason on a platter amid garnishes of tomato and zucchini slices? It's what? Good god—it's meat?! No, of course. No, we just thought… Well, just look at it. Yes, yes. We will. Of course.)

Hello. Yes.

Well, apparently this is delicious, delicious meat. Just a big thing of wholesome meat.

Suicide Medicine: a digression

We've seen the victims of clothing, sports, hunting, trapping, whaling, and pest control stick up for the institutions that did them in. And now it's medicine's turn.

Rushing from his graduation ceremony at upstate New York's Taconic Farms, Inc. (motto: "We’re dedicated to providing the quality animal models and services that can help you accelerate your research and improve your position in a competitive market"), the Rattus norvegicus subject has just been awarded the degree that will allow him to be experimented on and killed. His eyes sparkle with visions of a future dedicated to the promise of anonymity. He will receive a number—such as 6621-M—but never a name. Never an identity, apart from his disease model or phenotype. Never any consideration save what the law requires. And that's just how he wants it!

Let the rats dallying with their social sciences, their arts, their literatures—their soft world of the inexact and impractical—concern themselves with matters of the self. With signifiers and identity.

Our rat deals in Science! The quantifiable and repeatable. The impersonal and numerical! Science is the master to whom he is happily enslaved! The heady march of Progress! Where they strive for the future, those peerers into microscopes, he'll be there, contributing his tiny portion to Truth!

(Thanks to Dr. Eugen for the referral and to Seymour Miles for the photo.)

Sipahh: a dairy digression

By now you understand that nothing in Suicidefoodland makes the slightest bit of sense. Well, prepare to climb a stairway to senselessness.

The subject of our latest dairy digression (see the most recent one, too) is edible straws from Australia. This is merely the landing at the foot of the staircase.

The first stair: A cow advertises the product, presumably to make her immeasurable sacrifice meaningful. The babies she never nursed and raised fade into the blessed circle of the neverwere as she imagines children slurping up the milk intended for instantly irrelevant offspring.

The second stair: The cow, who gives milk, is male.

The third stair: Named Mort.

The fourth stair: With an udder. A big ol', flappy ol' udder proudly displayed and waggled at every opportunity.

The fifth stair, from Mort's unnecessary backstory:

Before we fell asleep, Mort said, "goot your grimbles." "What does that mean?" "I don't know," he said, "that's the point, not everything has to make sense...."

With this explicit acknowledgement that we have strayed into a realm without reason, our journey is almost complete.

The last stair: And now we have reached the top. Mort reenacts the infamous gross-out Goatse internet meme.

Pluck! You won't be needing your brain way up here.

(Thanks to Dr. Kitteh for the referral.)

Teat Tweet: a "what the hell?" dairy digression

We've presented "what the hell?" digressions before (for instance, this mind-bender) and dairy digressions (such as this curdled superhero fantasy), but never before have we embarked on a "what the hell?" dairy digression.

History prints itself on the page!

And now to business:

Have you ever wondered what would result from the combination of cutting-edge dairy farm techniques and today's social networking media? Of course you haven't. The whole enterprise is a ridiculous admixture of exploitation and boondoggle.

Or, as the Teat Tweet Dairy Diary puts it, "For one year, twelve cows on a dairy farm Twitter about their lactation cycle and robotic milking activities."

Though the silent cries of Why, oh why? deafen us, still we press on.

Thanks to this most unnecessary of experiments, empty-souled computer users can follow the gladly giving cows and despondently go along with the conceit that they are tweeting the details of their daily lives. The cows include Freeride Speedy ("12.8 kg of frothy deliciousness for the humans"), Frosty Lace ("That robot still won't let me in there. What is it thinking? I'll explode!"), and Montgomery Mae ("Gave 13.1 kgs and got my 120 g of daily food to keep me producing well").

The "researchers" have their high and mighty ideas about what this is meant to accomplish—something about our relationship with the agrindustrial complex—but all we see it do is pump out the time-worn idea that cows are only too happy to be continually impregnated and hooked up to milking machines. And here they are, sharing their every deed and mood like chatty college students, content to shine in the spotlight, taking a chintzy "fame" as their due.

(Thanks to Dr. Becci for the referral.)

Grove's Tasteless Chill Tonic: a "what the hell?" digression

Pardon us. It appears our brain has fallen out.

This product—this chill tonic—could scarcely have received a more suitable designation. Tasteless. And how!

Lay down your four bits (that's 50¢ in old-timey talk), grab a bottle for yourself, and see!

Drink it down and watch as you become… as fat… as a pig! (?) And as you metamorphose into an actual pig with a lace collar and receding hairline. (??) And acquire the affect of an elderly gentleman caught in mid-regression to his infancy. (???)

And just what does this, you know, mean, sociologically-speaking? That fat pigs are such symbols of happiness that we yearn to emulate them? That "food" animals are associated with rosy good health?

Who knows.

(Thanks to Dr. Benjamin for the referral.)

Addendum: Feel free to investigate the other posts in our "award-winning" (that is, non-award winning) series of "what the hell?" digressions: Dead Busty Turkey, Samsung Safari, and Cluck-n-Stuff.

What We've Been Missing 4: a digression

Truth be told, we only seem confident. Every few months, in the middle of the night, when the wind is full of questions, we wonder. We doubt. What if? What if we had stayed with the flock, living as the flock, eating as the flock? Oh, what treasures we could have savored!

And so, again, as we last did here, we embark on a tour of our own Gallery of Regret.

As always, the following dishes were all prepared by professional dish preparers.

We're not sure what this culinary mishmash is, but we're assuming Knuckle, Chicken Skin, and Month-Old Meat Surprise.










An ear in licorice gravy? A whole curried snout? A diseased lung?

No, silly, it's feijoada pig foot!









A wound on a bun.










Whatever this is, it doesn't appear to benefit from further inspection. In fact, it should come with titanium bun-locks. Those exist, right?

Happy Valentine's Day: a digression

Is there any better way to tell your special someone "I love you" than a slab of beef shaped like a Valentine's Day heart?

While we're on the subject, is there any better way to tell the cow in your life "I hate you" than a slab of beef shaped like a Valentine's Day heart?

Either way, this is the finest example of suicidefoodism's fabled inability to keep love and death separate. The movement's pathology forever confuses one for the other, creating in the process a gory mess of turbulent emotions.

Our Fragile Mental State: a digression

You see it too, don't you? Don't you?

It's not just us, right?

You see it there, in the art on the P.O.'s Burger and Root Beer sign. Just tell us you see it!

We were right about all those pigs, weren't we? All those pigs showing up again and again? A parade of duplicates, a nightmare of conformity.

We didn't make them up, did we?

And, sure, we see them when we shut our eyes. Sometimes they're hiding around corners, or under the tables in the cafeteria.

Or in the fogged-up mirror after we step out of the shower.

We've been doing this a long time.

We've seen a lot. We've seen too much. Every form of debasement. Ridicule. Contempt. The naked desire to find a helpless victim to kick. The whispered words that manage to make the kick feel like a kiss. We've seen it.

The point is, we know we're a little shaky lately. A little unreliable. We start at loud noises. A slammed door. A car horn. We're on edge.

But we're not crazy. Okay? You know? We still have a grasp on reality.

Just…

Just tell us you see it, too.

The smiling pig? In the hamburger patty and the tomatoes and the cheese and the lettuce?

Waiting. Lurking. Laughing.

That's a pig, right? He's in there, right?

Suicidefood Book Report: Animals Make Us Human

Editor's note: This should more properly be called a book reportlet, but as our spellcheck would have murdered us had we gone with that title, we had to use the less-than-accurate report. We pretend nothing more than a cursory familiarity with the book in question. And now, on with the… thing.

We can summarize Temple Grandin's Animals Make Us Human (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, ISBN: 978-0151014897) in five words.

Treat 'em better, then POW!

We concede that while this is a finer sentiment than "Give 'em hell, then POW!" it's not the most transcendent philosophy we've ever heard.

Noted livestock advocate Grandin has devoted her career to understanding the mysteries of animals' inner lives and speaking for them in their muteness.

She tells us that pigs have "lively, active minds," that cows form "close relationships, especially between sisters and between mothers and daughters," and that chickens are "intensely attached to their mamas."

And where has her insight led her? Not to urgent pleas to spare the animals, possessed as they are of their own drives, desires, joys, and terrors. Nor to seeking legal protections for the most vulnerable among us.

No, no. Not there, but instead toward more thoughtfully designed slaughterhouses. In other words, toward making a grotesque industry merely sickening.

All that empathy, employed in the service of killing them with kindness—literally—on behalf of some of corporatedom's heaviest hitters!

(Read our first book report while you're at it.)

Hershey's Instant: a dairy digression

Lunacy from decades past.

In this commercial, preserved for all time by a world in love with its trash, cows break their figurative chains and flee their confinement. What would cause such normally docile creatures to behave so, so… rambunctiously? Only the least reasonable thing ever, that's all!

They're not escaping—they're on strike!

Their principal grievance? Children have refused to drink the milk intended for the cows' vanished babies!

Experience the stirring (and insane) spectacle yourself:

The cows are up in arms!
They've left their fields and barns!
They're marching from the farms because...
Kids don't drink enough milk!

Hershey's Instant®
makes milk taste like a Hershey® bar.

The kids are happy,
They're drinking their milk—
The cows are going back home!

As soon as the cows see that the children are back on board, they happily return to their desperate lives of servitude.

No free spirits, these cows. For them, it's all toeing the line, doing what you're told, and Taking it from The Man! Well, you know. It's was the 60s.

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

Happy Third Suicidefoodiversary: a digression

It's been three years. Three long, please-please-make-it-stop years. In that time, we've given our in-house statistician plenty to chew on. And this is what he spat back out:

The Harper's Suicidefood Index.

Number of posts up to now: 559

Percentage of all posts involving pigs: 57.4%

Percentage of all posts involving cows: 23.6%

Percentage of all posts involving goats: 1.4%

Percentage of all posts involving snakes: .54%

Number of mustaches featured: 18

Number of stripper and/or showgirl animals featured: 5

Number of handicapped animals featured: 7

Number of royal animals featured: 19

Percentage of royal animals that are pigs: 63.2%

Percentage that are fish: 10.5%

Percentage that are crabs: 5.3%

Ratio of posts referencing soldiers to posts referencing hippies: 7:4

Ratio of posts referencing frogs to posts referencing golf: 4:3

Average noose rating (of all rated posts): 2.8

Percentage of all 5-noose posts featuring inappropriate sexual content: 24.0%

Average number of comments for each 1-noose post: 2.5

Average number of comments for each 5-noose post: 5.0

Percentage of all posts containing material referred to us by readers: 24.9%

Number of people who have threatened to report us to the police: 1

Number of wedding photographers who have suggested we be beaten until we leak: 1

Suicide Barnyard: a digression

According to a letter published in the November 30 New Yorker and written by a Mr. G. of Salt Lake City, Utah, it could hardly be more plain that animals want to be killed on small, family farms:

Is it better for aging animals to suffer, blind, arthritic, starving, or cancerous until merciful death? I grew up on a farm and can say with certainty that our animals gave their bodies in gratitude for a well-cared-for life. (Emphasis added.)

Not only do the animals participate consciously in some sort of exchange of services, à la Derrick Jensen's "bargain", but it is as if the entire process—their breeding, raising, and slaughter—were something the animals themselves established!

Can the humans be blamed simply for following the orders of their livestock masters?

What We've Been Missing 3: a digression

Every now and then (most recently, here) we feel driven to wallow in the consequences of our poor decisions. We have arrived at another such opportunity for reflection. Yes, the time has come again for us to wonder "what if?" What if we had not turned from the culinary path that stretched before us like a red (and moist) carpet? What wondrous fare we could have sampled!

Here follow more examples of "irresistible" food prepared by actual professional food-preparers.


We're just going to say it. We're half-convinced this is actually a bowl of used condoms. (The perpetrators claim it is steamed ribs.)








It looks prechewed, predigested, and thoroughly prevolting.











This dish represents the best of both worlds: livid, raw flesh married to an ancient, leathery rind of meat.









Picture it: The year is 3009. Humanity has inherited a bizarre and frightening Earth. Insects the size of poodles swarm the ashy skies. When they hit the windscreens of whizzing hover-sedans, this is the result. Lunch!