Holy Chuck Burger

Holy Chuck is working the symbolism hard. Both the sacrificer and the sacrificed, he is the perfect icon for a cruddy ethos.

Biblically speaking, whose head winds up on a plate? That would be John the Baptist. And who was responsible for that head finding its way there? Salome, step-daughter of Herod.

Both wrestle for a toehold within the figure of Holy Chuck. The innocent and the guilty. The accuser and the accused. The victimized and the victimizer. She who, triumphant, holds aloft the severed head, and the former owner of that head. All—each thing and its opposite—can be found in Holy Chuck. It's as though everything, every impulse and every impulse's obverse, ratifies the proposition that cows are to be eaten. Cows, which are, after all, sanctified stuff, holy chuck (the cut between neck and shoulder blade). She is simultaneously mere matter and the moral agent who transformed herself to mere matter, thus removing her own moral agency. It's a neat trick.

So eat! Engage in the sacrament of boviphagy. There's no way it can't be pure and good.

Addendum: It's Guidi Reni's Salome with the Head of John the Baptist (circa 1630), via Wikimedia Commons.

Special Report: Pig Logo Exposé 11

We're ready to dive back into the world of recycled pig logos. Review, won't you, the last time we indulged our inexplicable penchant for RPE (Repetitious Porcine Emblemology).





























































































(From left to right, by row: Lillie's, Northwest Tennessee Battle of the Pigs BBQ & Car Show, Get Your Pig On; Gourmet Grills, Holy Smokes BBQ Festival, In Hog Heaven BarBQue; Shawn's Smokehouse BBQ, Que-by-the-Sea, Pork U; BBQ Pit Boss, Louisiana State Championship Bowie BBQ Duel & Festival, Microwave Pork Puffies; Greet American BBQ Tour, Bixby BBQ 'n Music, BBQ Bonanza; Eagle BBQ Cook-Off and Spudfest, Giggly Pig BBQ Team, BBQ Throwdown.)

The hallmarks of the breed are the burly forearms and intricate nostrils. True, some examples of Burly (as he is hereby designated) are missing those two f-hole nostrils, but all appear to boast forearms of Popeye proportions. He also always (so far!) sports a bandanna or an apron. Unless those are overalls. It's clear that somewhere in his evolution, Burly split into two variants: the elbow-on-the-bar glad-hander and the dimwitted cowboy.

We'll be watching this one.

Addendum (12/16/11): And here are Burly specimens #19–22.

Don't think this is actually Burly? We admit it's not a perfect example of the form. But look at the curlicue nostrils. Never forget the curlicue nostrils.

Praise the Lard BBQ

Praise the Lord BBQ draws inspiration from Acts 11: 5-9. On the off chance we need to refresh your memories, here are the verses:

5 “I was in the city of Joppa praying, and in a trance I saw a vision. I saw something like a large sheet being let down from heaven by its four corners, and it came down to where I was. 6 I looked into it and saw four-footed animals of the earth, wild beasts, reptiles and birds. 7 Then I heard a voice telling me, ‘Get up, Peter. Kill and eat.’ 8 “I replied, ‘Surely not, Lord! Nothing impure or unclean has ever entered my mouth.’ 9 “The voice spoke from heaven a second time, ‘Do not call anything impure that God has made clean.’"

Clean! Clean! Rejoice that he is clean! Casting aside the prohibition against eating his flesh like a pestilent shroud, the pig glows with righteousness. Free—for the first time, free, free, gloriously free—free from the burden of that hated injunction, that stain that marked him as unfit, the pig descends from heaven as upon a cloud. The chicken's and cow's expressions might be heathenishly ambiguous—do we see on their faces fear? anxiety? disbelief?—but the pig's heart is strong and pure, like a bell that fills heaven with its peal.

His corruption has been cleansed, his sentence revoked, his disgrace rescinded!

Of all the uses to which religion has been put, the various forms into which it has been trained like a compliant vine, the most comforting by far is this: the cementing of the animals' role as humanity's dull-witted slave, its selfless foundation, the floor upon which it treads.

And lo! The pig looks upward, arms flung wide, in thanks. For now he will be eaten. Even as the cow and chicken, he will be eaten!

Angel's BBQ

A sturdy example of the Grateful Sacrifice, one of the icons of the suicidefoodist movement.

If we could hear the thoughts of this pig, this newly minted angel, he might say, "At last! I am delivered at last from the stinking life into which I was born, and which was bequeathed to me as a necessary precondition for my ascendance into blissful eternity!" (Getting killed and grilled really brings out the poetry in a pig.) "Ill will? I bear the humans—my betters from their soles to their souls—no malice, for they have engineered my deliverance! And the only cost was a brief—so, so very brief—lifetime of worthlessness!"

Which is why the haloed food wears a beatific smile. Through his suffering and utter abnegation, he is clarified into his essence. And now, on ornamental wings, he soars to his last and best destination, and the life beyond life that his death and consumption made possible.

Holy & Oly's BBQ

They're just folks, Holy and Oly. You can tell by the overalls and baseball cap. And by the way they're completely unconcerned by and unimpressed with the kind of stuff those snooty innalekshuls are always yammering about. (Do they ever stop their yammering?)

All that swill about self-determination, autonomy, and the rest of it. Just a bunch of five-dollar words. If it doesn't put food on the table, Holy and Oly don't want to hear about it. All your theories and your perspectives and your isms. All due respect, you can chuck 'em all, perfesser.

These two are practical, you see. They've got their feet on the ground, thanks very much. Give 'em a plate of their grandmother's ribs and their grandfather's drumsticks and they're happy as any animals ever were. What's that? You say they're next? Well, of course they're next! Think they don't know that?

They've learned it's the simple things. Eating, getting eaten, and all that. That's all they need to make their own heaven on Earth.

Heavenbound BBQ

Let us take a moment from the concerns of the day to remember all that we do for pigs.

There are the trivial things, the earthly things, almost contemptible for their worldliness:

The feeding, the (temporary) housing, the (grudging) medical care.

But look higher! Cast your gaze to the spiritual fulfillment of the pigs. For it is here where humankind's drive to do right by pigs really shines! By killing and eating pigs with such care and gusto—and with an admirably monstrous frequency—we free them from this world of muck and mire. Free, free, so many pigs free! More than a billion pigs a year! It's monumental, an operation alight with the zeal of a million missionaries.

We launch them to their eternal reward, so that they might cavort in the very bliss we so assiduously deny them down here.

Hillbilly Heaven

We are reminded of Egyptians killing their servants to wait on them in the afterlife, to lessen death's bitterness. Even in death, the exalted pharaoh, the wealthy man, the miscellaneous functionary will find life not so different from what they always enjoyed.

In the hillbilly's case, by granting his food a new role (that is, the same old role) in the beyond, he finds that he can go on.

And lo! It's not only hillbilly heaven. The pig, the chicken, the turkey, and the cow will be food forevermore, dawn to dusk, eternally, world without end. From their cloud, they smile upon us, secure in their spot in Heaven's blessed stockyard. They bear the hillbilly no ill-will. To the contrary: they owe him everything! Before he dispatched them, they were stuck in the reeksome, foul mire the rest of us call life. But now! Now, freed from the stinking burden of their existence, they attain the opportunity for the state most craved by "food" animals. Not life after death, but something even more precious: death after death.

Fork 'n Halo BBQ Sauce

Talk about playing both sides of the street!

It's like the entirety of pig creation has endorsed this stuff. The saintly want you to partake. The corrupt want you to partake. Partake, damn you!

That old trope, the angel on one shoulder whispering its pious guidance while balanced by the wicked words of the imp on your other shoulder, has been bled of dramatic power and any moral significance by the exigencies of selling meat moisteners. There is no longer any choice to make, any set of competing forces to weigh, any character or courage to explore and discover and test in the forge of the battle between Good and Evil.

When neither goodness nor turpitude can be defined by its opposite's absence, when neither retains the power to tempt or console, when all we're left with is a neither-good-nor-bad mongrel of ambiguity, can we be free?