Photo: Toronto Humane Society
It’s no secret that North Americans have a really wacky relationship with their food. Eating disorders, obesity, replacing love with comfort food… But the weirdest of all has to be how our society deals with meat, especially meat that is cute.
Two items in the news recently have caused that issue to hit home.
The first is the case of Wiggles the pig, a 2-month old piglet that fell off the back of a truck, presumably on the way to a factory farm where she would be fattened up and made into bacon, pork chops and spare ribs. A good Samaritan stopped and rescued her, taking her to the Humane Society where her broken leg will be mended and she’ll then spend the rest of her life in either a hobby farm or a petting zoo.
Being downright adorable, Wiggles immediately won the hearts of everyone who heard her story. There was no talk whatsoever of sending her on to her original destination, and when the factory farm was mentioned, followers of her story secretly shuddered. Then turned the page of the paper and grabbed another slice of bacon, or another bite of their ham sandwich. Wiggles, we care about. The other hundred or even thousand pigs on that truck… not so much. Or rather, we prefer not to think about it. One injured little piggie, sure, she’s so cyooote! But no one wants to be the first to stand up and say no to the factory farming complex. Few are wise enough to truly equate Wiggles with the bacon on their plates, and everything that means, and even fewer are brave enough to say no, I cannot, will not, eat that.
The bigger story, of course, is that of Governor-General Michaelle Jean and her participation in a traditional Inuit ceremony that required her to gut a seal and eat some of its raw heart. Animal rights activists around the world, not the mention people from the EU where a ban on Canadian seal products goes into effect next month, have denounced her actions.
Of course this too throws back to the “cute food” issue. Animal rights groups use images of baby seals with white coats to rake in the donations because adult seals are not nearly as adorable. It has been illegal to kill whitecoats in Canada for over a decade, yet those groups trot out those same old pictures every year in order to manipulate people into supporting their cause.
And like the Wiggles story, the hypocrisy is rife. People who would happily eat a cow or a chicken or a pig brought up in a factory farming system have some twisted issue with hunters using humane methods to kill a seal. Even if they intend to use every part of that seal. People who would never consider becoming a vegetarian will fight and argue the rights of those mean, stinky seals. (Seriously – adult seals are mean buggers, and they eat fish all day, not roses.) But people have been manipulated into believing those seals are cyooote and therefore more worthy of living than an animal that might show up on the average North American dinner plate.
How fucked up is that?
Note re: comments – as a former vegetarian (who desperately wants a pig as a pet), I am familiar with both sides of the issues raised above. The point of this post is to look at society’s attitudes toward our food, not restart the seal hunt debate. Comments are moderated and any that do not directly deal with the food issue will be deleted.
