Suicidefood Book Report: Baxter, the Pig Who Wanted to Be Kosher

In this, our fourth suicidefood book report, we continue our tradition of dabbling at the surface of books we haven't fully, completely finished. Or perhaps even begun. (Reacquaint yourself with our previous reports: Animals Make Us Human, Endgame, and Punk Farm.)

Our subject this time around is Baxter, the Pig Who Wanted to Be Kosher  (Tricycle Press, 978-1582463155) by Laurel Snyder, illustrated by David Goldin.

[Editor's note: It's possible—just maybe—that, in relying on a particular source, we may have misrepresented the nature of the book in question, as thoughtful commenters have lovingly pointed out. Integrity Laziness compels us to keep the following as originally written.]

According to the blurb at amazon.com, it would appear this charming picture book is actually a chilling tale of premature animal dementia (PAD). As they put it:

"Baxter desperately wants to experience Shabbat dinner, the special Friday-night meal that ushers in the Jewish day of rest. [...] When he learns that pork is a forbidden food according to Jewish law, he stuffs his face with kosher pickles and raisin challah, hoping to become kosher. He even tries, unsuccessfully, to become a cow."

And you're surprised that suicidefoodism lingers? That it spreads like illness? That it lurks in the forgotten corners of the cultural hive, waiting waiting waiting to regroup, to regrow, to re-emerge and conquer!

Baxter—dear, foolish Baxter—wants so badly to experience everything the humans experience that he thinks nothing of attempting to make himself edible. The adorable string of misadventures he embarks on have at their center a trusting pig's desire to make himself the centerpiece of their holiday celebration. Not, you understand, to finagle an invitation, but to make his very flesh suitable for his hosts' consumption.

(Thanks to Dr. RandiJM for the referral.)

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?

Calf Club

We'd like to tell you all about this, but after reading up on it, we're still feeling a little dizzy. From the Calf Club's website:

Originally the day was known as Calf Club even though children exhibited animals like lambs and goats, but with fewer children now having access to 'farm animals' the day has become known, in some areas, as Pet, Livestock or Agriculture Day, with events for all classes of animals, pets and handcrafts.

LIC strongly supports New Zealand's dairy, beef, deer and sheep industries and recognises that there are young farmers who work hard each year to select, prepare and show young animals at these school events.

This website provides information and guidelines to help you and your child select, train and show a pet - and most importantly, ensure everyone enjoys the experience.

Okay! Did you spot it?

It's the seamless, oh-so-natural conflation of the categories pet and livestock.

Let's be fair: The organizers of this event explicitly encourage young people to take good care of their animals, to treat them kindly, to make sure they have proper food and clean bedding. It's clear they believe—and the kids feel it too—that the up-and-coming "farmers" form a strong bond with their (ahem) pets, a connection born of duty and affection. We would assume that many "farmers" find this a commonplace.

But to us, that adoring calf—with its serene smile and worshipful gaze—knows more than it lets on. For, whether destined for milking or "rearing" (that is, being raised for meat), it will not long be anyone's companion. Are we wrong to detect a trusting nature in the calf? Not a trust that it will always be—and have—a friend, but a bedrock faith in the entire administration that will see to its eventual disposition. From friend to food, the calf is in their hands. Where it belongs.

Quality Semen Tanks

"I finally have my own little bundle of joy product! Thank you, Quality Semen Tanks!"

So says Mrs. Cow, we can only assume, on cuddling her newborn for the first time.

She knows what lies in store for her offspring. She knows that for a she-calf, it's a life spent voluntarily offering up her milk and her own offspring. For a he-calf, it's most likely an adorable processing at the hands of hard-working vealsmiths.

Which is why she's so pleased with the product line at Quality Semen Tanks. Because that's what makes it all possible. The fulfillment of her too, too brief motherhood. The succession of babies dedicated to milking and vealing operations. The peace that comes from knowing her place. All of it concentrated in her love and gratitude for sturdy, well-made semen tanks.










Addendum: An outfit called Goode Cattle uses the same mom-and-baby graphic on their website. They go one better (or one stranger, at least) by using this one, too, which looks for all the world like a cow in love with a Millennium SC20 semen tank. Perfectly understandable.

Olathe's Annual Kids Fishing Derby

You know what's awesome? Fish! Fish are awesome. This one in particular.

Just look at him, leaping out of the water, the very thing that sustains him! And why? For the kids! It's all for the kids.

The fish knows kids love killing things, and he loves kids, so he's only too happy to oblige them. The beauty part? He loves dying just as much as the kids love the idea of dragging him into the reeking air where he will suffocate, slowly and awesomely. It's like symbiosis, a partnership so perfect and, well, awesome, it almost gives you the shivers.

(Sad note: Participation is limited to the first 600 kids.)

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.

Bar-B-Quetie

Who's a cute widdle piglet? Who's a widdle pwecious piglet? You are! That's right! You are!

With your pink ribbon! It's just the cutest! You're just the cutest!

I could just eat you up! Yes, I could. You happy widdle piggy!

Oh, those fwoppy widdle ears! They're just so fwoppy! I could just nibble them up!

And who has a chubby widdle tummy? Who has the chubbiest widdle tummy I could just gobble up? You do. Yes, you do!

Okay, but no. Seriously. We're going to eat you. Just conk you on the head, butcher you, and cook you. And we're just going to eat the hell out of you. And make you the mascot of our business selling a wide range of barbecue accessories. And it will be the cutest quetest thing.

Even the flames will be pink.

Belly Busters BBQ

This bloated figurehead, this depraved emblem of the anti-animal worldview, has a magic talisman: his obscene girth, his grossly distended form. It is a source of endless pride. And why?

"Why?" you ask?

To you, we say, "Why not!"

It's as though he has accepted the whole institution of meat-eating—swallowed the entire enterprise, you might say—and transformed it into flesh. He has appropriated the engine of his own destruction! He lives by becoming one with the forces arrayed against him! His pride is the pride of the survivor. But no—he doesn't merely survive. He transcends! He dominates by being dominated! He contains a multitude of enemies. He preserves and memorializes the refutation of himself. He has become a temple to his own worthlessness, his body its wheezing altar.

And this is the story told by his cartoonishly untenable physical state. It is a tale of supreme satisfaction.

Every day, each steppingstone on the pathway to his doom, is a kind of victory. A very strange and very, very meaningless victory.

Mama's Real Good Chicken

Are you surprised to learn of the long tradition of parents offering up their young for your gustatory enjoyment?

(Ducks do it. Pigs do it. Cows do it!)

We know we shouldn't find it remarkable that chickens engage in this hideous custom too. But we do, we do. We might have supposed—a nagging sense of decency still resisting everything we've seen here—that this practice couldn't continue.

Still, the evidence is plain: Some mama chicken has transmuted her motherly pride into a bloody campaign of poultricide.

Unless… You don't suppose this is just another example of birds happy to be raised, killed, packaged, and marketed by humans, to humans?

KC Smoke Dawgs

Like other "food" animals, disaffected young pigs of the stifled suburbs long for death-by-barbecue. In their hoodies and sweats, they lurk on street corners, waiting for their big chance.

Affecting the attitudes and rhythms of the streets they barely know, the gang aims for a sort of lawless cool, but hits instead a kind of clueless desperation. They've brought their own barbecue and they've stoked it up and parked it at the curb. And there they wait, the sweat trickling down their backs.

Hang back, fellas. Give it time. You're young yet. There's still plenty of time to die.

Niku-Mansei

This venerable Japanese beefstitution is really more Bovine Nation in miniature than business dedicated to the art and science of preparing portions of cows for consumption. Why else would the logo bear this charming portrait of cows from a variety of stations and stages of life? The gentleman, the crêpe-making matron, the pram-pushing mama, the young sow with the parasol, the adorable tykes. It could be a scene from fin de siècle Paris!

The effect of the message is twofold: First, by presenting the entire Family of Cow, the animals in all their humanity, as it were, their status as injured parties is obscured. Their grievances are refuted before they can even be considered.

Second, by showcasing a broad swath of cow society, they further neutralize the animals' objections by making bovicide appear uncontroversial to all of cowkind. In fact, it is such a commonplace that thoughts of fear or horror never entered any of the cows' minds.






Addendum: This is the same strategy we saw employed by Sweetwater's seafood restuarant. "They don't mind," the images say. "None of them mind. Up and down animal civilization, they're all on board. So! Ready to order?"

Addendum 2: We're reminded of this papercraft from Japan. And (scroll down) who's that making a cameo? More cow-related papercraft—from Niku-Mansei! Small world!

Jughead and the National Buffalo Wing Festival

Forsythe P. (Jughead) Jones—icon of wholesome American gluttony—shows up to give us a textbook example of IAS, a concept we haven't delved into much since this piece from 2009.

By masquerading as a chicken whose life is devoted to dying (and who eats chicken and who has a chicken for a head), our eternal teenager is enacting a time-honored ritual wherein people assume the role of "food" animals.

With this purportedly humorous inversion—human and commodity trading places—Jughead endeavors to deflect some of the blame he has earned through a lifetime of relentless consumption. Oh, the uncounted burgers he has forced down his elastic gullet at Pop Tate's! But here, on the grounds of the National Buffalo Wing Festival, he imagines he has taken on the role of victim (the phenomenon is known, after all, as Ironic Aggressor Sublimation). Oh, of course it's a pose, one that underscores the total domination exerted by the human overclass.

(Thanks to Dr. Robert for reminding us of what was under our very noses the whole time.)









Addendum: There's also this, from the same issue, harkening back to a theme we've been tracking since 2007.

Bacon Flavored Instant Baby Formula: a hoax

It has taken us more than two years, but we have finally managed to turn up another suicidefoodist hoax.

It is a true testament to the insanity of genuine suicide food that hoaxes are so rare. When the real thing sends rational minds careening into the abyss, what need is there of exaggeration? And how many pranksters would willingly take on such a challenge, to outdo the established suicidefoodist academies?

In this example of so-horrible-you'd-assume-it's-real nonsense, the hoaxers describe an experiment to perfect a bacon baby formula.

"[W]e consulted with pediatricians and began to experiment with drying and grinding bacon into a fine powder, then applying a patent-pending process to concentrate this powder into the most essential nutrients and ingredients for brain development. This potential infant superfood was then added to a test subject’s infant formula.

The results were absolutely impressive. By the age of 4 months, our test subject started to exhibit some amazing abilities including walking and talking. By 6 months of age, she could read and memorize her early stage children's books and showed an extreme level of coordination and balance...."

And, of course, because, lark or not, suicidefoodism demands the recruitment of animals into positions of abject powerlessness, the label of the (fictitious) product bears the image of a diapered piglet. He watches us benignly, unafraid to become a dried and ground bacon supplement.

(Thanks to Dr. Lou for the referral.)

Mellin Baby Food

Italian babies live like emperors!

They eat chickens and cows and fish, naturally. But their palates push them far beyond the pedestrian tastes of humbler infants. Push them, in fact, to the consumption of rabbits, lambs, ostriches, and horses! (There's something especially grand about the thought of a horse—a stamping, champing beast, so sturdy, so tall, so proud—killed, puréed, homogenized, and portioned into tiny packages for the delectation of a diapered Nero.)

The power and goodness of tyrannical children makes dying and being eaten that much more honorable! To be spooned into their pure mouths! To be wiped from their rosy cheeks and glistening chins!













The rabbit smiles shyly at the thought of it.

The lamb beams a gentle grin.

A wholesome smirk plays upon the chicken's beak.

Today, they will be served to babies, accompanied by the fanfare of Italian airplanes threading the skies and Italian trains charging into tunnels. What a send-off!

(Thanks to Dr. Marina for the photos.)

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.

Kids Fishing Derby

Oh, but fish do enjoy a good play on words! Or, a play on words, at any rate.

And this particular play on words is just about irresistible to fish! (We've seen it before here and here.)

They're all about the hook, those fish. And why shouldn't they be? The hook represents their highest aspiration: to be jerked from the nurturing waters and dragged into the deathly air, where they may succumb in paroxysms of pain.

Do you see? While the fish in the foreground is cracking wise (or, you know, "wise"), the fella in back has a notion to bite down on that hook. He knows it's a trap—the Head Fish's line is hardly subtle—but he wants it all the same. Fish get a bad rap. We're told that they have the feeblest memories (not true). That they are impelled by nothing more than overpowering instinct. Now we plainly see that fish aren't stupid. It is just their all-encompassing wish to die that makes them seem that way to us.

And however you interpret the fish's exhortation to "get hooked"—is he encouraging other fish to join his cult or more fishermen to start killing fish?—it's a warped worldview only a twisted fish could espouse.