1/2/10

Suicide Food


My kids and I are fond of noting advertising that makes it look like animals want to be eaten.  We find it (a) revolting, (b) funny, (c) unbelievable...roughly in that order. Now I discover there's a whole blog devoted to tracking this trend.  I love it!  The first chapter of my book (coming out this month), "The Myth of Consent," is about the notion that animals like being our food.  As goofy as it is, this is an idea with a long history.

Note the great psych evaluations at the blog--


A 5 noose example:




Eyeball wash, please. 

5 comments:

Faust said...

OK that's wierd.

Probably more insidious though is the advertising on Humane Certified food. I was looking at the various egg cartons over the holiday and I noticed that virtually all of them depicted what you would classify as your "level 4" farms. Idyllic pictures of chickens in wide open fields with little girls feeding them out of baskets. I'm pretty sure that's not the kind of environment you are legally required to provide to get the Humane Certified stamp of approval. So it's no wonder that people feel good about the labels if that's the pictures they are sold under.

Jean Kazez said...

Ha--level 4 has the little girls. Level 3 just has flowers and butterflies. Yes, all this stuff tends toward the deceptive. Still--I do think there's a non-trivial difference between "humane certified" and other food. It's just not as great a difference as they want you to think.

Tom said...

So does Chick-Fil-A get some credit for their advertising campaign in which cows are encouraging people to eat more chicken?

Jean Kazez said...

Hmm...we might give them a few points for seeing that animals don't want to be eaten, but they want us not to sympathize, but to find the desperate cow amusing. So--in the end they get an F just like the "suicide food" advertisers. Or perhaps I should say--5 nooses.

Faust said...

But wait!

What about....

Suicide vegetables:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1gD8nV8RlPU

Humans anthropomorphize EVERYTHING.