Everything is -'friendly'. Eco-friendly. User-friendly. Reader-friendly. Objects, concepts. What happened to human-friendly?
Vegan-friendly, trumpeted the package, which contained wheat germ. Long-term readers might or might not recall that I have had something of an ongoing semi-obsession with the over-earnest, ungrammatical, or sheer moronic label claims that plague manufactured food products. Clearly, either the general population - the consumers of these goods and their verbal assaults - or the marketing industry - their illiterate authors - has become stupider. Or both. Probably both.
Irony aside, what madness is it that the consumer needs a printed assurance that a bag containing 100% ex-vegetation has no animal content? Or that its processing has not knowingly been associated with members of the animal kingdom throughout its journey from grassland to four-colour-process-overprinted crude oil-based plastic packaging? Which, in any case, means what? A process worker rides her horse to work and ties it up to a hitching post in front of the factory? A cow strays from a nearby paddock and wanders through? Sparrows flit about, as if pecking at the abandoned junk food in the food halls under the glass domes of vast shopping malls? It doesn't specify. The grinders or mills or whatever they use to process the grain can hardly have been used to mince meat.
There was a sting in the tail, if you'll pardon the animal metaphor. On the back of the wheat germ pack appeared a photograph and a recipe suggestion. The photograph was of a piece of dead chicken. What a cruel joke. Vegan-friendly declaration on the front, and a raw drumstick, dismembered from its gallus gallus domesticus complement, on the back, waiting to be dredged through an egg- (questionable, again) and-wheat germ crusting before being plunged into hot oil and deep fried. And eaten by whom, exactly? The vegan? While not a vegetarian I do appreciate the jump-scare potential of a piece of mutilated chicken suddenly appearing on a vegan-friendly pack. OK, the food stylists had preliminarily dressed it in an initial sheen of dusting flour, but that only made it look more obscenely dead.
Maybe my mother - or whoever it was in the clacketing blue Volkswagen on that seemingly prehistoric day in 1964 as it pulled away from the kerb outside the European health food store in Buckley Street, her impossibly blonde pony tail flicking like a centauress’s - was right: buy food in bulk, save money, cut out the middle man, and avoid the nauseating entreaties that reduce humans to the level of kenneled dogs fighting over their food (‘boil for three minutes then slurp those yummy noodles down!’)
STOP PRESS. A brand of eggs is trumpeting its animal-friendly credentials by counting its chickens' steps. This is not a joke. The package enjoins the consumer to look at each egg to see, printed in dot-point type, the number of steps its mother has taken before being production-lined via some automated mini train-line into a cardboard box and thence into a truck bound for consumerville. I chose an egg: 28,000, the retro dot-points read, in a kind of shadowy reincarnation of a 1980s computer typeface. Twenty-eight thousand! Yes, okay, chicken steps. But still. They were her steps. For a broody hen, that's a marathon. Why would a chicken walk a marathon - and have humans applaud the deed by printing the feat like some trophy script on her egg - except to display their sanctimonious but misplaced animal-kindliness? Who’s to say the poor sparsely-feathered bird hadn’t desperately embarked on the chicken equivalent of humans walking the floor endlessly, searching for her tattooed egg while warbling Fats Domino's I’m Walkin’ - in that sad sonorous chirp they have - knowing that humans will soon be eating her children after their delicate shells have been imprinted with the extent of her torture. No doubt the egg thieves expect you to break your egg with a sharp crack of animal-ethics-affirmed satisfaction, and eat it with sourdough (very lightly toasted please), accompanied with the usual customised wellness- and sustainability-approved breakfast options.
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