BlackMustard Barbecue Slather

All too often, animals are made to serve as pawns, puppets to express the darkness dwelling within our hearts. Cartoon effigies are created and dressed in the garb of the willing victim, made to wriggle their danse macabre when it suits us. These depictions are drawn as the mouthpieces of our obsessions. We put the script before them, a gun to their heads, so they might speak our sermons for us.

How refreshing it would be to hear from genuine animals, directly, to know their own authentic thoughts, unfiltered by our preconceptions, unhidden by the palimpsest of our competing desires!



















Oh.

Yes, well.

Ship Captain Crew BBQ

Just a couple of pirate-types at your service. While we've seen pig pirates before (here and here, for instance)—and even a chicken pirate!—we can say with swaggering piratical confidence that this is the first pirate cow and goat we've come across.

And speaking of confidence, get a load of these two! The cap'n, with his arms crossed over his chest, perfectly secure in the rightness of his eventual death, and the fork-wielding crewman—these guys have mastered the pose of inappropriate peace.

Of course, as pirates, they should be, you know, fighting. Resisting. Rebelling. Anything other than basking in their own sanguine victimhood!

But these are vagabonds on the high suicidal seas, remember. Aboard the ship Sacrifice, they consult their maps and steer into every bay that offers them the merest hint of getting killed and eaten. One day. One day they'll reach it.

Billy's Boer Meat Goat Farm

No, no, you don't understand.

This goat really, really wants you to do this.

He is a meat goat. A meat goat. A goat made of meat, a goat made to be meat. And he's okay with that.

No, more than okay.

He is ecstatic about that.

His eyes are practically glowing in unendurable anticipation.

He has already looped the cord around his neck. He wants you to lead him to the Special Place.

Will you do it? Will you do this for him? For all of his kindred meat?

Ketchum Manufacturing Inc.

It is by now a truism that happy livestock enjoy being sacrificed for your pleasure. So widely recognized and acknowledged, so extensively documented that it hardly bears repeating. What is news to us, however, is that livestock are so enamored of the entire birth-to-plate process. Everything about it gives them delight. In other words, it's not just the dying that they love; it's the very fact of their subjugation!

Now we can understand what's going on in these images from Ketchum Manufacturing Inc. For in them we see the joy of the enslaved, for whom slavery is not merely the water they swim in, so to speak, but the very staff of life.

It's all here. Before this sow's identification as consumable property, she is apprehensive. After receiving a firm smack with the sow body identification system—the "slap tattooer," a happy device sporting rows of spikes—she is relieved. Her identity as a specific, specified object has been confirmed and ratified and made permanent.








Now, this pig benefits from an extra little something. There's being born into a pen. There's the pleasure of being an edible cog in a machine dedicated to your destruction. But livestock aspires to more! For instance, what about creating profit for your owners? Somehow, the Ketchum ear tattooers let a pig do just that!

(Can you read the copy? Did you really think we would need to make up a phrase like "birth-to-plate"? The suicidefoodists have been at this business a long time.)












Precocious piglets and goats love this stuff too!

Happy Harvest Farm

Harvesting. Apparently, that's what they're calling it now.

Not only that, but at Happy Harvest the goats are "nurtured in love." What else would you expect from a member of the Tennessee Goat Producers Association? We assume they were meant to be the TGNA—the Goat Nurturers instead of Producers—but by the time they noticed the typo, the shirts and bumper stickers had already been printed.

Just take a look at those goats. Those are some pampered animals. They smile sweetly, knowing that their slaughter harvest will be a happy one. Their transformation into chevon (your word of the day) is no less glorious than the caterpillar's into a butterfly.

Lewisburg Rotary Club Goat Barbecue

We confess. We are perplexed. We are dealing with either 1) a brilliant piece of suicidefoodist propaganda, or 2) the stupidest goat ever.

In other words, either

1) The Lewisburg Rotary Club Goat Barbecue is a traditional event, wherein pigs in great profusion will be spitted and roasted. The goat, fearing that he will be excluded, arrays himself in pig drag. (Much like these chumps.) Do you see the lengths the animals—even goats!—will go to in order to sacrifice themselves to us? We are practically providing a service to them, granting the opportunity, as we do, to die.

Or,

2) The Lewisburg Rotary Club Goat Barbecue is indeed a goats-only affair and this one here thinks that by disguising himself as a pig, he'll escape the Agony of the Coals. If this is the case, the goat could stand to learn a thing or two about pigs. Any fool knows that pigs are just crazy about dying! They'll stop at nothing in their quest to be killed and grilled. Seriously, have you ever seen a pig making for a barbecue? They're like running backs tearing toward the end zone. And all that's without the barbecuers eagerly greasing the skids. No, if the goat wanted to escape attention from this crowd, he should have dressed up as a salad.






Addendum (9/12/10): This lobster is another pig masquerader. Is this a whole thing now?

(Thanks to Dr. David for the image and the referral.)

Kid Stew

Children rely on us for so much. Perhaps the most important thing we can give them is an example. A model of how to go through life with a healthy sense of themselves. With this foundation, they can fend off those who would harm their minds, their hearts, their bodies.

It innoculates them from so many of life's pernicious dangers.

This goat child—appearing on a website of Baytril, the pharmaceutical world's foremost animal-carers-about—seems not to have had a suitable model. Consequently, his view of himself and his worth is warped beyond all sense.

That's why he is looking to you for approval. He will do whatever it takes to get it.

He will bring you wine. He will offer up one perfect rose. He will serenade you. He will get the mortar and pestle and pound the oregano and garlic. He will assemble all the other ingredients. He will die.

(Yes, we've featured animals from the Baytril website before.)

Dixon May Fair

Suicide Food as interpreted by a visionary with the sensibilities of Hieronymus Bosch! Everywhere your gaze wanders, the quaint livestock fair is revealed as a nightmarish horrorscape!

Wheresoever you cast your gaze, new grotesques await you! All about the panopticon, demons lurk!

Behold!

1. The Trio of the Condemned. While the animals count their few remaining moments, the musicians play on, as uncaring as statues.

2. The incarnation of insanity. The world around him devolves into a hellish hallucination and he swings through the air in a bizarre simulation of joy.

3. Two cows—one a blue ribbon winner (she'll fetch a handsome price!)—lasciviously regard the taurine fiddler. Oblivious to looming catastrophe, they think only of procreating. Lust has overcome them and banished decency. Even amid the conflagration, their thoughts are ever on the bestial.

4. As if acknowledging that they'll never be able to outrun the falling hatchet, the motorcycle-riding hogs pause in their hedonism and face death with enthusiasm.

5. Meek and mild, these sheep will inherit only the whirlwind.

6. Ignorance personified, the goat, popcorn in hand, believes he's watching a harmless performance. He is unable to comprehend the enormity of what is before him.



7. Jitterbugging young chickens. The equivalent of fiddlers plying their craft while Rome burns?

8. A delusional chicken dances alongside her son in an updated retelling of Oedipus Rex.

9. A minstrel show? Oh, great.

10. The duck administers his own force-feeding.

Iowa Meat Goat Association

Let us get reacquainted with Grant Wood's iconic 1930 portrait of—take your pick—upright Americana, small-minded provincialism, tradition, and/or the urgent need for progress.

The pair has served as a scrim upon which has been projected the American experience. Our foibles and virtues, our past and future—everything we hold dear or would gladly leave behind… It has all been seen within the flinty farmer and his wife. (Wood's sister, the model of the farmer's wife, was aghast at her portrayal as wife to a crusty old man. Consequently, she was the first to suggest that the woman in the painting was meant to be the farmer's daughter.)

Wood's painting has been coopted and satirized innumerable times, and the Iowa Meat Goat Association's offering is particularly rich.

To see livestock cast in the role of Everyman and Everywoman is unsettling. It's the same muddled thinking we've seen so often. The goats are equated with us. They wear clothes. They have jobs. He tends the fields. She keeps the house. Together, they make a life.

They are imbued with all the cultural significance of Wood's farm couple, all the complexity and ambiguity of each of us.

And yet they are livestock, born to die. The "home" they pose in front of isn't a quaint old farmhouse. It's a barn. They represent the Iowa Meat Goat Association, for crying out loud! They are afforded no opportunity even to be goats. No, they are meat. We are meat!

Exactly whom is the IMGA diminishing here?







Addendum: Another example. Perhaps because its style is so cartoonish—miles from Wood's realism—the Johnson's S&SDB logo doesn't offend any more than the average suicide food offends.

(Thanks to Dr. Cathy for the Johnson's Seafood & Steak referral and photo.)

Punk Farm

Punk Farm (Knopf, ISBN: 0-375-82429-4) is our current favorite token of suicide food. This charming picture book's got everything: the lies we tell children, complacency dressed up as rebellion, and a worldview so warped it's practically hallucinogenic.

The book concerns a "punk" quintet of farm animals calling themselves Punk Farm. These anarchists, what do they do? What is their statement? Do they pour sugar in all the tractors' gas tanks? Do they murder the farmer and his complicit wife in their beds? Do they even try to make a break for it? No, no, and no. They put on a show. Boy, talk about shaking up the system. (They should have called themselves Lackey and the Uncle Toms. The goat even wears a chain around his neck—"fashion" statement or sly celebration of his subservient role?)

It gets worse: These radicals hell-bent for leather are such cultural renegades, their big fear is being found out by the farmer while they're punking it up.

"The farmer's light is on!" The animals freeze. The microphone screeches. Footsteps can be heard in the distance. Will they get caught?

What's the farmer going to do to you? Fatten you up for slaughter? Keep you perpetually pregnant and take your babies away from you? Um, guys? He's already doing all that.

And it gets worse worse: When they do put on their "rebellious" show, their big number is "Old MacDonald"! That's right—when they finally stir some shit up, they sing a song that ratifies the farmer-livestock relationship.

Of course, this whole book is a paean to the status quo, to the rule of law, to practices that even the least self-aware animal would choose to destroy. But not our "punks."






Addendum (10/20/07): We just discovered that the feature-film version of Punk Farm will not, in fact, be produced by DreamWorks. We confess that we never knew a deal of this sort had been in the works at all. It was to feature these so-called "rebellious" animals staging an all-animal music festival called (shudder) (cringe) (a little bit of vomiting) "Livestock."

Goat World

This goat sees himself as a cross between Superman (that red and yellow pentagonal figure behind him) and Atlas, bearer of the world. The latter characterization is closer to the truth. For while the goat has no super-powers, he does bear a terrible burden. His impressive abdominals cannot change the fact that Goat World—his world—thinks of him merely as product to be moved.

Says the Goat World website:

"Our goal is to produce superior quality breeding, show and commercial grade stock to serve the needs of the Full blood and commercial meat goat producers in New Jersey and the entire Northeast."

So much rests on the goat's narrow shoulders! And for his sacrifice, his selflessness, his service, surely the people of Goat World treat him with the utmost respect? (Are you new to this? Of course they don't!)

Our goat here is a boer goat. This is what Goat World has to say about another breed, the savanna:

"We believe the Savanna breed will help us meet our goals as commercial meat goat producers. Savanna goats are functionally efficient, meat-producing goat that exhibits excellent growth rates, muscling and carcass traits. This breed make a great pairing with our herd of Boer goats."

Excellent carcass traits. Do you even want to know what that means? We do not. But we know enough to understand that it isn't livestock industry-speak for "Goats are God's creatures." And what of "meat-producing"? Does that not call to mind industrious goats laboring to produce a commodity from the sweat of their brow? But, no, the goats are the commodity. All they have are their bodies, and even those do not belong to them.