Giant Crab Seafood Restaurant

In any world bearing the faintest resemblance to our own, a monstrous crab stationed atop a restaurant door, eight-foot claws ready to clack trespassers in half, would serve as an efficient deterrent.

Who would come within 100 yards of the place? It would be the food-industry equivalent of a castle with a dragon perched on a turret.

The crab would have his way with the frightened hordes, the puny humans suddenly impotent, their hands full of useless weapons.

His laughter would rain down upon them all like ashes!

But we're not in the real world. We're in Suicidefoodland, where reason cowers in the shadows. And where a gigantic crab forfeits his own terrible power in order to welcome people to dine on crabs.

It's only the latest in the tiresome series of so-called submissive dominants, massive brutes who turn down the chance to destroy their attackers and instead submit to a longed-for victimhood. We've seen them many times (for instance, in this post from 2009). And now it's the crab's turn to forsake vengeance and honor. And sense. And crabs.

Wild Wings 'n Things

In his airplane—the perfect embodiment of a flight-challenged bird's yearning for freedom—the chicken experiences a startled joy at being alive and headed for death. It radiates from him.

Puffing above the clouds, the chicken finally feels what his longing heart has spoken of all these many years: power. The power to be who he wants, where he wants, how he wants.

And what he wants is for his wings to have—at last—purpose. (And if he can find a way for his, you know, things to have purpose too, well, that would be just fine.) He will fly his wings directly to you, hot with life's ebbing flame! The wings will be wild.

And he will fly evermore. In chicken heaven.

(Thanks to Dr. Pippi for the referral.)







Addendum: When he's not plying the skies in his magical airplane, Chickeman (sic?) hits the road in his prosaic van.

Brew-B-Q

One last party, a final celebration before leaving the cloister of college and entering the real world.

And what a change it will be! No more Friday night keggers. No more close-knit community of like-minded buddies. No more easy life of responsibilities so small they can be discharged even through the miasma of a hangover.

The journey they embark on is a solemn one. And while they're proud to have come so far and eager to set out and prove their worth as edible objects, they need one last bash to mark the milestone. Which is why the one pig is tending the barbecue (his own, if you get our drift), the cow's wielding the fork, and the chicken—the perennial short straw drawer—has died of zealous beer-bonging.

(Thanks to Dr. Pat for the referral.)

Hambones by the Fire

O Death, where is thy sting? O Hades, where is thy victory?

The magisterial might of suicidefoodism flicks aside the Reaper's feeble jabs.

Death? You thought death was enough to quench the animals' thirst to be consumed? They live for this stuff. Die for it. Whatever.

And so, although death has at last claimed the tattered mantle of the pig's mortality, he carries on. In nothing but bones, he shows up for work at 8:50 (thank you very much), ready to dish up the flesh of the recently deceased. (Perhaps even the meat formerly encasing his own soul!)

He'll be cooking pigs until hell freezes over. And when that happens, he'll just switch to pork sundaes.

(Thanks to Dr. Rick for the referral.)

Hutton's Sausage

Outside their factory in New Zealand, these sausages—forgive us, these sizzlers, as the ID label indicates—are demonstrating true dedication to an ideal.

Hunkering down in a giant frying pan, they beam, they wink to passers-by.

(Or, at least, we think they're winking. Could that be the gleam from their monocles, instead?)

One throws his arm around his brother, who is slowly, deliciously rendered, converting himself into his elemental essence. Thus, the sausages reenact the seasonless cycle of life death.

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

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.

Pork Rinds, a retrospective

It's the quaintest obscurantism in the suicidefoodist canon: pork rinds. As though pigs are, what? Melons? Do melons smile like that? Dream or hope like that? Ha!

This rogues' gallery of fiercely oblivious spokespigs represents a soaring low-point in the annals of meaninglessness. Somehow—and we agree that this lacks a consistent logic—the sight of pigs extolling the virtues of their own fried skin is worse than pigs talking up their own cooked meat. It's more desperate. More depraved.

The very idea of pork rinds is so revolting, it's a wonder we haven't discussed them more often. In fact, the last time was more than eight months ago. So.

Welp! No more stalling.




























































The entire breadth of pigkind has turned out to support the proposition that their skin makes a convenient and appetizing snack. The top-hatted captain of industry, the dancing fool, the simple country soul, even the cowboy atop his docile flying buffalo—all pigs, from the lowliest to the loftiest, give the nod to pork rinds!







Addendum: If you can bear it, revisit our discussion of the most horrendously named product in the field of pork skin offerings. Yes, even worse than Microwave Pork Puffies (see above), but just by a hair.

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.

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?

Unidentified Japanese Barbecue Restaurant

Your first thought might very well be "That poor husky pig. He's obviously got some issues."

And, yeah, sure, it's easy to imagine his childhood—the taunts, the insults, the endless comparisons to his athletic older brother Donald—and the way it warped his view of himself. How it turned him, in fact, into a pig who sees nothing wrong with advertising pork.

So there he is, believing it's all he can aspire to ("Coach Franklin was right about me!"), pointing out barbecued meats with his flyswatter thing (?), and letting himself be the butt of the joke. Again.

What a life. (While it lasts.)

That's probably your first thought.

Then your second thought would have to be, "They did all this for a Chris Farley gag?"

This time it's not just us.

Your third thought: "I don't know who I feel most sorry for."