Turducken, the ultimate obscenity in Thanksgiving gluttony
This new “Thanksgiving tradition” was featured on Night Line tonight. I looked at these pictures, and labelled it an obscene crime against nature.
When I thought about stuffing dead animals with other dead animals, and looked at the pictures, I was reminded of a book by Carol Adams, titled The Sexual Politics of Meat. Here’s an excerpt from a book review I found at http://www.ivu.org/books/reviews/sexual-politics-of-meat.html:
Animals become “absent referents” when they become “meat.” They are absent in three ways: literally, because they are dead; linguistically, because they no longer cows, pigs, chickens, sheep, OR animals, instead become “beef,” “pork,” “poultry,” “mutton,” “food-producing units,” or “meat”; and metaphorically, because animals and their experiences are appropriated in metaphors which we used to describe our experiences rather than theirs. Adams claims, I think correctly, that “sexual violence and meat eating, which appear to be discrete forms of violence, find a point of intersection in the absent referent”
After reading other on-line sources on turducken, wondering if the goal is to see how many different species one could stuff into one’s mouth in one bite, it occurred to me that all of those animals are ultimately stuffed into humans — who become the “outer layer” of this recipe. And I was reminded of this drawing by Sue Coe, ‘The Ark’. Even the person in the drawing has kind of a turkey shape. Check it out!
