Reykjavík Svið

It's like that old Icelandic saga:

There was a witch named Hriðmir whose magic had fled him. He wore the white coat and the white hat, and he chanted to the Giants of the North Wind, but the magic was extinguished and flared no more.

As Hriðmir sat on the banks of the River Hvitá, which in those days was called the River of Tears, he wept for his departed magic.

There arose then, in the midst of the river, a sheep with a fleece like gusting (?) winds, and the sheep said to Hriðmir: "Who weeps? Who that wears the whites has need of weeping?"

And when Hriðmir told the sorrow (?) of his departed magic, the sheep withdrew a blade and lopped off its smiling head, which bounded onto Hriðmir's upturned shield. It was the harbinger of his magic's return.

But not really. It's nothing so grand as all that. It's just an advertisement for svið, an Icelandic dish of sheep's head, on display at a large Reykjavík bus station that caters to foreign visitors.

Although, now that we think of it, why should this sort of sacrifice—which we now know has reached Iceland—require any dressing up? It's already the stuff of everyday legend.

(Thanks to Dr. Bullet for the referral and photo.)

Little Sheep Hot Pot

What's so great (read: not great) about this little guy is how particular he is. With his little bow-tie and his little blue eyes and his little smile and the little red... things in his hair (horns? dinner rolls? lobster tails?) and his transparent little ears. This is clearly not just some old lamb. This is, well, this specific lamb.

So what might have been a generic still-living-ingredient is presented instead as an individual baby animal. An individual baby animal shipped from Inner Mongolia and lightly boiled and served in Beijing.

It's one of suicidefoodism's enduring paradoxes: seeing the animal who was butchered for your supper as a separate being, a being apart from some great abstract flock or herd—and a cute baby being at that!—somehow renders it more easy to kill and consume. Little Sheep Hot Pot's patrons don't want more psychological distance. They want to get right in there, oohing and aahing as they settle their napkins on their laps.

We might have assumed people would react to such a character with revulsion or, at the very least, distaste. Or, we might have assumed that before we started our Great Project.

Foxlights

This equipment is used for chasing predators away, thus safeguarding livestock.

Now, we would be ghouls if we refused to acknowledge that non-lethal means of dealing with predators and protecting prey are better than the alternative. Surely scaring off foxes and wild dogs with a bunch of lights beats poisoning, shooting, and trapping them.

And yet.

The freedom the livestock enjoy—the liberty—is the freedom to remain someone else's property, to be kept from harm until the time is right.

Of course, we're not surprised that, like poultry we looked at long ago, they would rather not be carried off in one set or other of slavering jaws.

But their gratitude feels a little… off. It's like being grateful for shag carpeting in your cell. It keeps the chill away and comforts your shackled feet, but wouldn't parole feel even sweeter? Cold comfort might be better than no comfort at all. Granted. But wouldn't you imagine that animals would aim a little higher? That they would reserve the Lady Liberty get-up for something that came closer to the real thing?

In Suicidefoodland, the animals think a little differently. A little strangely. They have long contented themselves with small blessings.

Australia Day BBQ Competition

In the shadow of Seattle's Space Needle, hopeful Australians and their equally hopeful sheep gather to commemorate the arrival of the first batch of colonists—half of them convicts—to arrive in Australia, in 1788.

They do this, of course, by barbecuing their friends and/or being barbecued by their friends.

Which, we guess, is their quaint way of reenacting the warden/prisoner motif.

(Pardon us, but Australia Day was actually the 26th. We're late. But we're sure the animals had their chance to die, and that's all that matters.)

Rick Curtis Quality Meats

This mural is the very essence of sanguine. Bloody, yes, of course. It's painted on the wall of a butcher's shop, for crying out loud. The implication of blood is everywhere. The thing may as well have been painted with blood.

But, no. We mean the collegial scene. The gang is so darn cheerful, so content with their lot. The whole bunch is satisfied and easy-going, from the chicken getting ready to attack the dangling string of sausages to the pig enjoying sexual harassment at the hands of a malicious, grabby sheep. The butcher and the steer—look at the way they've flung their arms over each other's shoulder. These two, inexplicably, have managed to form a real bond of friendship.

We say inexplicably because the steer, in his living form, couldn't have been around much longer than the time it took to pose for the mural. We wouldn't have thought he could have made much of an impression on the busy butcher. Then again, the steer does look to be a character, what with his cosmopolitan ear- and nosering and his country-gentleman wheatstraw.

That they all—well, the four-legged and feathered among them—will be, you know, gone before you know it is hardly enough to dampen the mood. These are quality meats, of good character, made of strong stuff. They know their place. More than that, they take obvious pride in knowing their place. There they go, smiling, blushing, cavorting, sexually harassing, right up the end.

(Thanks to Dr. Fletch for the referral and the photo.)

Browns the Butchers

A proud tradition of sheep stomach stuffing and boiling, haggis represents all that is Scottish.

However, this disembodied sheep's stomach is English, the tam o'shanter notwithstanding.

He wants you to eat him and his fellow, um, muscular digestive organs in a weird and punishing tribute to the heritage of the people who killed the sheep who previously housed him.

Funny isn't it—and we don't mean funny ha ha, we mean funny completely screwed up—that the stomach, good old Gastro, is depicted as an animal-like quadruped. He even has a tail! (Unless that's just his darling little pyloric canal.) It's as though the sheep's absence means the haggis ordeal is simply too far removed from anything resembling a cute little animal. This is unacceptable! Thus, the personified stomach, an entity we can hardly believe we haven't invoked before.

Martini Bitter

They're doing it again. The suicidefoodists—who, in this case, appear to be accidental (or maybe meta-) suicidefoodists, their primary aim being the advertising of booze—are tarting up the she-animals. It's a sobering reminder that slutty livestock can be pressed into service to sell anything.

These ads' legend, there in the lower-left: "Makes food that easy." Superficially, this is, we suppose, a message about the ease of pairing this particular alcohol with food.

But take note of the literal meaning they bank on: this stuff makes animals easy. Plied with liquor—the right liquor, our liquor—the animals are rendered willing. Wink, wink.















The secretary pig, coquettish atop your desk, no longer has shorthand on her mind. The streetwalker cow, leaning in your car window, considers throwing you a freebie. The barfly sheep, garish in her desperate makeup, plans on taking you into the back room.

(Secretary, whore, drunken bar habitué. Yep, that about covers the complete range of womanhood.)

As food, the animals are without the capacity to act as agents in their own behalf. They are props, there to be exploited by the careful application of the right product. Happily exploited, they exist for everyone's benefit but their own.

La Table du Terroir

We don't want to tell the Academie de Suicidefoodisme Français its business, but "terror" in French is terreur, not terroir.

And what word could describe this tableau of butchery better than terreur?

Les amis, together even after their death and decapitation, favor us with the rictus of dismal joy. It's as though they have chosen to descend from their heaven to haunt the boulevard, to coax the hungry and demented. Or maybe this is simply their way of watching the final act of their lives' drama: not their release from the prison of life (O, blessed moment!), but the intimacy of their own consumption.

C'est la mort!

(Image source.)

The Farmers Market Cornwall

The suicidefoodist splinter group that's been on everyone's mind is now front and center!

The so-called Happy Meat movement takes suicidefoodism's implicit creed and makes it explicit. Its two primary postulates: 1) Animals raised under certain so-called "humane" standards are happy, and 2) Such animals, perhaps in gratitude, are content to die for the pleasure of humans.

The Farmers Market Cornwall sullies this already-shabby system with the addition of a dreary, yet depressingly familiar, twist. Namely, that there is no distinction to be made between an animal and its flesh. The presence of the sheep himself—the woolly, willing victim—seeks to lend credence to this rancid worldview.

We would not use the word happy to describe an animal who sees and values himself only as meat, as a commodity to be consumed by others. We would say instead perverted.

Try and understand: he poses with a sign that proclaims his status as inanimate object and, moreover, suggests that his happiness matters only because his palatability derives from it.

HappyTime Farms

The so-called Happy Meat phenomenon finally comes out of the closet. This place puts the word front and center. It's one big happy time down on the farm!

The cow is smiling to beat the band! Talk about your wholesome good time!

Bundle the kids in the car and head on down. Depending on the season, you can enjoy a pumpkin patch, corn maze, and hayrides. And don't forget the multitudes of grinning animals.

Please contain your confusion and alarm when you discover that not every activity there is suitable for the whole family.

This flier—a promotion for the same happy farm—was under windshield wipers in our actual neighborhood, on our very street:

Granted, the sheep look a little cheerful, we suppose. Nothing to rival the toothy cow from the website, but still. They appear happyish, right? In spite of the dissonance created by the very name of the establishment—happy time… slaugherhouse?—the sheep are at least bearing up well.

They're exhibiting stoicism, maybe, more than actual happiness. Or a gritty determination to meet the end with courage and nobility, perhaps.

Then again, could it be the grim acceptance of impending death? The misery of their fundamental impotence? The rage of the condemned?

Oh, but just look at us go on, with our anthropomorphism and our habit of making everything complicated. Let's just start over, shall we?

See the happy animals. They are happy. They will die happy. Good night, everyone!

Agricon 2009

The right jolly driver is surrounded by his right jolly mates. (That's mates in the British sense.) And they have every reason to be jolly.

Why, they have a road, a means of hauling and being hauled, and they have Agricon, "the only conference dedicated to those working within the Agricultural, Foods, Tipping, Milk and Livestock sectors of today’s road transport industry."

Naturally, the ebullient sow has pride of place (she gets the passenger seat instead of steerage), but all of the animals are, you know, haulage. Cargo. Goods. Stuff. Just this side of inanimate. Don't let the smiles fool you—these things are barely alive.

And that's what they're smiling about!

You see, in a strict, class-based society like England's, there's a certain comfort in knowing one's place. It offers some a security denied them by too much potential. The Road Haulage Association provides the livestock all the lack-of-potential they could ever wish for.

Cooking with Casseroles

The least practical cookbook of all time!

Judging by the cover—let's please just agree that that's going deep enough—one doesn't cook casseroles; one simply allows a troupe of livestock and crustaceans to pull together a routine and whip something up.

Hence, the cow juggles a couple mushrooms, a scallion, and a pineapple—along with a wok, a pot, and a tureened crab; the crab begins his pantomime act; and the sheep prepares for some classic sleight-of-hand.

And then, the finale: with a flourish, the cow leaps into the oven, the sheep flings herself onto a spit, and the crab drops the lid to seal in his "juices."

It promises to be a magical evening. And you didn't have to lift a finger!

(Thanks to Dr. JJ for the referral.)