Guess What's Coming to Dinner

Are you fed up with the horrors of culinary gore? You should be.

Consider how much of what we eat is disguised so we won’t be shocked and disgusted if it were known to us what freakish foodstuffs we are really ingesting. I’m not just referring to the usually normal grotesque items on the menu, like chopped liver and parsnips, or cabbage soup and kidney pie. Normally, food is rightly disguised to create the illusion that we are not eating dead baby cows that were starved so we could have pink patties smothered in mushrooms. Nobody wants to eat toe-food or sheep dip, even if the Chinese say it’s good for you. In China and Japan, they pay hundreds of dollars to sate themselves on bird nest soup, replete with aviary droppings and rhino horn powder. In some circles, fish head soup is considered a delicacy.

These fetish foods have been mostly confined to the menus of a minority of snooty upper class rich people and oedipal wack-o’s who want to feel superior to everyone else. I make no bones about those entrees. Fashionable and trendy delectables like shark steak and eel stew are now offered along side spinach-flavored yogurt. Why has mass-marketing of “health foods” become such a popular substitute for cheesecake and hotdogs among the couch potato elite? And why should you care one way or the other?

Don’t be lulled into “health” foods and “organic” products. It becomes a matter of grave concern when the nightmare on Main Street has reached into every home in America, right down to the very unpalatable quasi-cuisine we are being force-fed by corporate agra-business. Here’s something to be hopping mad about: we now are eating tomatoes with toad-dna, genetically engineered to give them a longer shelf-life. And what about fleegled chicken… essentially, macabre poultry manufactured for the fast food marketplace…We ought to refuse to stomach a beakless, clawless, featherless “creature,” a pathetic facsimile of a chicken bred for more efficient slaughter! Who wants a BLT when the tomato is part amphibian? Is it still a chicken when chicken plucking is no longer part of preparing our coq a vin…I think not…Are we to accept every gourmet innovation on the menu which has been plucked and stuffed with monstrous ‘substitute’ standards?

We must not accept this gruesome trend without strenuous gastric protest. We must not succumb to the Frankenstein era of faster food. This horrific movement to trendy freak of nature victuals is the direct by-product of the mass-market assembly-line food chain. When I look at my cooked chicken garnished with finger-looking good potato fries, I expect my piece of chicken to be delicious, and I don’t think it’s too much to expect my visualization of my portion, when it was alive, to be a pleasant experience as well.

I want chicken that looks like chicken…even if its goose is cooked and it’s dead on arrival. We deserve good-looking food with pleasant sounding selections. Our inner-most intestinal fortitude is on the line. Let’s not forget that our fundamental happiness and liberty is to be found on the dinner plate. How can we eat a chicken that has been horribly mutilated even before it’s cooked, a chicken that has been monstrously conceived, and callously dished up as if any dead piece of poultry will do.

Can you imagine being fed the worm that your piece of fish ate?

Or looking in your intestines to see what happens to what you eat after you chew and swallow it? How horrible does it have to get before you say, “Enough is enough!”

My personal dismay is profoundly matched by the global horror of the “internet cannibal” who was solicited on-line to eat someone he was corresponding with. The manly portion was cooked in olive oil and garlic, with some parts frozen for future meals. And after he had been digested, the chef was sure his own mental abilities had improved…debunking once and forever the notion that “to serve man” was just a memorable Twilight Zone episode.

You couldn’t get me to eat human, cooked rare or well-done…it really isn’t gastronomically correct – not for a million bucks – well, maybe I’d imbibe in a few morsels for that kind of lettuce.

Still, my best advice is not to be flying off in any charter jets with a championship rugby team across the Andes, if you get my drift.

There’s a reason why we’re not cannibals. How would it look if you were served a human arm on a plate garnished with parsley?

Or, a leg of man? The very thought is completely repugnant and horrible.

Lobster claws are hideous enough. You might think you’re about to eat a deformed hand. Then there’s noxious seaweed salad and even more hideous, clams on the half-shell? Since when is half a shell considered palatable? Neanderthals might have been cannibals, but that’s no excuse for us to pig-out too.

Military K-rations, also known as “combat food,” are now color-coded to make them “mentally” more appetizing. Oh, sure, there I am, being bombarded by incoming artillery, with severed arms and legs flying hither and yon, and then to add insult to injury, I get served dried up little portions of pineapple upside down cake.

I suppose I should be thankful we fought the Japanese and bombed Hiroshima just so I could get mochi ice cream whenever I want it. Other such international stomach pleasers include boiled swamp rat, basted cockroaches, grilled bull penis, and fried earthworms.

Add to your shopping cart transgenic bananas with antibiotic herpes inhibitors, chunky bits of dehydrated celery, and hand-dipped chocolates preserved in environmentally safe waste-management wrappers.

Consumers want something more than canned vegetables. Or freeze dried coffee. Or yellow dye number seven. That’s why we have candy with soft centers. (In case you forgot, chocolate is a narcotic.)

Restaurants serving up road kill are also very popular these days.

Crushed possum rib and mashed rabbit stew are attractive entrees.

We are being desensitized! How do we stomach such tripe?

Our humanity is being frittered away in the morass that is being served to us in the global mess halls by mega-corporations…How long must we endure such callous disregard for our tender entrails by golden parachuted executives who sit down to a lunch of squab and martinis?

If you’re as fed up as I am, show your disgust by refusing to open those stupid fortune cookie packages you get when you buy Chinese take-out! Feed them to the birds! Those cutesy little sayings and esoteric babble are only meant to distract you from the utterly unhealthy “cookies” that come with your take-out. Please!

Who wants a bunch of platitudes from some defunct Confucian philosopher asking “what is the sound of one hand clapping?” What happened to the other hand? I dare to ask. Maybe it got boiled into a ghoulish goulash?

Leading psychiatric experts have postulated that eating a human being is really a sexually deviant act and not just a disgusting perversion of unpalatable cookery. It has also been suggested that a dry Portuguese red wine is an appropriate choice for the occasion.