Percy Pig

Have we been living under a rock for the past 15 years or so? We didn't think so, but how else to explain our complete, happy ignorance of the Percy Pig phenomenon?

The pink stalwart is not only the spokesman for a candy popular throughout the United Kingdom (in a recent year, the candy makers raked in more than $15 million)—he's also an ingredient. The standard variety of Percy Pig candy contains gelatin of specifically pig provenance. A version prepared without pig gelatin was set to be made available earlier this month. We assume Percy will endorse this suspect product as well, but only out of contractual obligation.

And it's more than candy. It's toys, socks, sheets, calendars, books, and on and on! What does it say about the hungers within the British bosom when a pig known principally for his eagerness to donate the collagen from his own skin and bones can launch and sustain such a merchandising juggernaut? (A Facebook fan club reportedly has upwards of 200,000 members.)

We already know what it says about Percy. It says he's suffering from the queasy-making combination of over-weaning self-esteem and abject hopelessness so common (it would seem) among the world's "food" animals.

(Thanks to Dr. Liz for the referral.)

Special Report: Pig Logo Exposé 10

For reasons known only to ourselves (at best), we like to assemble paeans to frequently seen suicidal pigs. The last one was a good while ago. Our files are bulging, so it's time for another.






























































































































(From left to right by row: Orchard Old Spots, Westfest 2006; Hamm's Meat, Stu-Pit BBQ Team; B. P.'s Smoke House, Mission Cochon; Bowie BBQ Duel, Rob's BBQ on the side; The Barbeque Hut, Conway's BBQ in a Box; Carolina Children's Home Annual BBQ Cook-off Festival, Bacon Camp; Tri-State BBQ Fest bucks, Big Pig Gig; Boss Hogg Award Winning World Famous BBQ, Lucknow Fall Fair; Garden State Porkway, A Hampshire Hog; GoodLand, Manfield Village Covered Bridge Bluegrass & Barbeque; Ware's Bar-B-Q.)

Appearing in such profusion, Dopey (as he shall hereafter be known) is surprisingly resistant to variation. Yes, he can be given spots or sunglasses, but he doesn't invite the same kind of tinkering other overused pigs do. Compare Dopey's immutability with Lumpy's or Jowly's ability to assume different roles and master new contexts.

There's something steadfast—almost admirable—in Dopey's insistence on remaining so trusting, right up to the end, over and over again.







Addendum (5/22/11): What no one was waiting for: Dopey specimen #22.

Live from the Turkey Necropolis

Just in time for just barely missing Thanksgiving comes this video sure to set your funny bone to tingling and your soul to throwing up all over itself.

On the stage in the teeming, maddening turkey necropolis, temple to the Soon-to-Be-Delivered-from-the-Horror-They-Loved-So-Well, the comic reaches right into his audience's hearts. For nearly three minutes, he nails his routine, calling out a string of phrases ("Christmas dinner," "I've got a carving knife," "Anybody got any giblets?") that send the turkeys in the packed auditorium into gales of laughter reflexive cackling.

It's like we've always said: turkeys might prefer their stand-up comedy tedious and juvenile, but they sure do like dying. They like everything about it, from the act itself to the implements that bring it about, to the sprawling deatharium that is their home until it happens.

(Thanks to Dr. Meave for the referral.)

Any Plaice Any Time, It's Fish & Chips

It is touching how much faith the fish has in the skill and handiwork of his servants (or are they his masters?), Saltshaker and Vinegar. The fish isn't even dead yet, but he lies with complete confidence on his bed fashioned from fried potato fragments.

He knows he doesn't need to micromanage the activity going on around him. He doesn't need to offer suggestions. He doesn't need to do anything at all, but lie there, smiling and waiting, at last, to die.

(And he won't have to wait long. He must already have been out of the water for several minutes.)

So while he dreams gaspingly of his eternal night, Saltshaker brandishes his spork and leers within his nimbus of sodium, and Vinegar pokes a drowsing tomato and spurts with all due pungency.

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






Addendum: A plaice is a type of European flatfish, Pleuronectes platessa.

The Pink Pig Company

This pig is the picture of good cheer, pictured atop his pink background, so indicative of rosy health. He's happy, happy being so plainly equated with the food they intend to make of his flesh. Yes, just look at that quality pig pork. Impressive—isn't it?—how much abuse, how many insults the "food" animals bear, smiling all the while.

If someone referred to you as "meat," how would you respond? Think of it! "You're dead meat!" someone says. It's hardly complimentary. No, it's another way of saying you are merely experiencing the interval before your approaching death and your return to pure matter. No longer will you matter, for you will be nothing but matter. What does it mean to be treated like a "piece of meat"? It means, of course, to be treated as inanimate, a thing possessing no agency, no will, no intrinsic worth, only whatever value someone else sees fit to assign to you. And what of the bane of the single-but-hopeful, the "meat market"? Who wants to go there, where all romantic possibility is reduced to its meanest elements?

None of these implications would bother our pig in the least. Nope, he's meat and proud of it. Or, well, as proud as meat can be.







Addendum: Familiarize yourself with Terry Bisson's sci-fi nightmare "They're Made of Meat" for a tangential take on this theme.

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.

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.

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.

French Market in Bath, England

We never even knew we'd been dreading this: the John Waters approach to suicide food.

One need not be possessed of a cinematic imagination or a taste for the tasteless to see in the coil of sausage something transgressive. Transgressive and excretory. Be honest: you do see it, yes? The robust, meaty, spiraling turd?

(Bravo to the proprietors for giving us something new. After so many tiresome pairings of sex with violence, someone had the guts to pair meat with shit. That is fearless ingenuity.)

After the eye lingers—far too long, we know—on that feculent monument, the adorable pig comes into view. And what is in her hand? We know what it is meant to be—a length of "delicious" "sausage." No matter how we interpret it, the little pat she gives her thigh or backside (or whatever) suggests only one thing:

"Eat up! Plenty more where that came from!"

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








Addendum (2/10/09): Another instance of the same image (flipped). Must be a European meme. "I am delicious!" (Photo source.)