Happy Food
A few weeks ago, I got from a Couchsurfer a pack of Kangaroo meat as a present. In the package, there was an illustration of a herd of Kangaroos in the wild. That got me thinking about one of the things I find most surreal in our world.
Have you ever noticed how many packages for animal-based foods, or restaurants which specialize in a kind of animal, often sport images of such animal in a happy or cartoonish way? Like the pork restaurant with a cute pig with a chef hat in the billboard, or the fried squid tents in Japan with a happy squid preparing the fried squid balls. Now, while I don’t object in any way to eating meat, these kind of illustrations are just creepy to me. I mean, the animals probably wouldn’t be too happy about being eaten, and certainly would not be preparing the food themselves. Really, it is just WRONG.
When my RPG player blood is strong, I often enjoy imagining counterpart scenarios, like festivals made by trolls and orcs where images of cute little boys or smiling women illustrate the tent where they sell snacks made of unlucky adventurers… 
By the way, the Kangaroo meat was not that good, if you were wondering.
May 8th, 2010 at 9:35 pm
There is a site that specializes in these sorts of cartoony depictions:
http://suicidefood.blogspot.com/
Quite funny and often disturbing.