The Smiling Pigs of Suicide Food

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Ham hocks, divorced from their owners.

For us to eat meat, animals must croak. Nonetheless t-shirts, advertisements, and signs for restaurants and stores specializing in meat dishes as well as packaging for meat-based products routinely depict anthropomorphized pigs, cows, and chickens acting quite cheery about their position at the center of the plate. The blog Suicide Food has latched on to this absurdity, gathering such images, posting them, and offering up colorful psychological evaluations of the animals involved.

Suicide Food claims to side "with the oppressor and considers itself a "bellwether of our decadent society." The blog's creator Ben Grossblatt also claims the blog is "not funny." Wallowing in wit, he is about as wrong as a many-breasted sow wearing a fluttery mini-dress. This entry from July 6, 2011 garnered four nooses for "deeply disturbed and disturbing":

Suicide Food

"Henceforth, or until we have to stop because it makes us feel too weird, this mingling of meat and sex will be referred to as feastiality. What else can we call it when they create this mash-up of iconic sex symbol Marilyn Monroe and a rack of pork ribs? (Yes, yes, there's also the hilarious 'rack of ribs' = 'woman's bust' cliché.) They want to have their cake and eat it too. That is, they want to "have" their sex symbol -- if you know what we mean -- and consume her too."

Saturday's entry only racked up two nooses, for "appalling," but Grossblatt's commentary is priceless:

Suicide Food

"This pig looks like a helluva pig. Decent, hard-working, friendly. Great fella to hoist a couple with. Which makes him a good candidate for someone to see a ball game with, but not -- we suggest -- to take sober advice from. He's gearing up for a bacon bash, after all, an event devoted to eating him. Maybe he's already had a few too many? Or maybe he just can't turn down a friend in a tight spot. If you need a late-night ride to the airport, or help moving to a new apartment, or, say, a bunch of bacon, he's your pig."

Pigs like wiggling through the open air and munching on clover, burdock, and thistles. However they don't like dying. Even connoisseurs of free-range, sustainable, and politically correct meat must come to terms with that. Though their time on earth may be relatively charmed, certainly much more so than that of their factory-farmed brethren, no domesticated beast, however bucolic its upbringing, grins at the glint of the ax-blade. And in case we forget, Suicide Food is here to whack us over the head with a ham-sized slug of irony.