what the eff is that?.. [..muffle.hypocrisy.].

A coworker today eagerly suggested we play a ‘game’ of trivia called ‘What the Eff is that?’—something she [obviously] wanted to share with the group in the few minutes remaining during our morning meeting. She whips out a leaflet from her bag and hands it to the guy sitting next to her—which wasn’t me [I’m a girl]. He looks at it closely and starts at an attempt to answer: ‘it’s uhhh….’. As he does so, I’m sitting there trying to guess what this is all about. From the tone of her voice when announcing the so-called game she sounded surprised and/or disgusted or just truly confused—an occurance not too uncommon in her case [bless her]. I was thinking on the lines of it being an abstract image, making her have that type of reaction, like an inkblot or something. The guy finishes examining the image and I motion for it to be passed on to me. I take a look and it’s a colorful takeout menu written in Spanish. On the back there are a few pictures of items they offer—I’m guessing platters they want to highlight? The point of focus is one in particular—it’s an.. an.. animal of some kind: whole and belly up on a bed of lettuce.. or rice, I forget which. It had legs like a rabbit, paws like a squirrel, and a head like a beaver or perhaps a rodent. It was a takeout menu, the picture was no more than two inches wide and you can imagine the resolution. I guess what she meant was: ‘What the Effin’ animal is that?’ And maybe to add, ‘People really order/eat that??’.
The discussion continued after the meeting was over. Someone finally figured out what it was—the name of the animal and everything, that is, in Spanish, without translation. It was confirmed to be along the lineage of rabbit. The discussion continued with the topic of eating animal, or rather, meat. I was reminded again how far removed our culture is from knowing where food comes from and what it is we actually swallow.
I was hearing people—meat lovers/eaters at that—say they would never eat what they saw in that picture—a relative of Thumper, I’m assuming. They said they would never eat what they saw in the picture next to it either—the plated head of Porky. In fact, they extended that rule to all animals—no heads, they scorned. Really?? I asked in astonishment. Even if, despite the head on, they were offered meat from the body? Apparently so. Well, what about fish?. I don’t know what I was thinking when asking that. That there’d be a difference if it lived in water vs. land? or if the animal was smaller? Dumb, I know. But anyway, no was the answer to my silly question. Fish is delish, but not if it comes with a head; note to self, buy only from those fish the headless seas when entertaining.. ..O, c’mon, let’s get real, these people are crazy. When I was a kid the cheeks of the fish were the best part and I’d only get to have one of them—my brother got the other, with a fish having only two cheeks and all. These folks have missed out on the ‘best’ part of their fish-eating lives, I thought. What a shame.
I stopped questioning at fish, but the girl who brought in the menu, who started all this, continued to say she wigs out even when she gets shrimp with the heads on. My head was about to fall off. Good thing it didn’t, though, because maybe she would’ve eaten me.
Americans don’t eat animal. They don’t eat cow or pig. They eat beef or pork or bacon or ham. They don’t eat horse. They eat hotdogs. I wonder how it is that they’ve come to eat chicken. Then again, maybe they don’t but do nuggets or buckets of KFC. And what about the breast milk of cattle?. Umm, if you’re talking about what is added to cereal or what makes lattes, that stuff comes merely in jugs or cartons from the refrigerated section of the supermarket is all, thankuverymuch. That reminds me of, I guess what I would now consider, that clever commercial for orange juice: a woman shopping in the refrigerated section of a supermarket for orange juice reaches her arm way into the shelf, and from the orange tree orchard on the other side, she pulls out a ‘fresh’ box of pasteurized orange juice—just as if picked from a tree—the box full of peel-free, pith-free, fiber-free, pulp-free juice, that is.
Great [exclamation point]. So calories aren’t the only things that make people oblivious. That is, how much people eat aside, they [or many] have no effing clue what exactly it is they’re eating—where their food comes from or what’s been done to it, from farm-to-table [pardon the trite expression] or chemical plant-to-plate. Perhaps, though, ignorance is bliss. I mean, ignorant can heartily chow down on mystery flesh [to prevent illness/deficiency, she claims] as long as it looks nothing like its real live form, with eyes, and teeth and so on and so forth. But if the ignorant are to stumble upon reality, then let’s just hope cultures are not disrespected nor baseless opinions spoken aloud—keeping everyone at bliss [and headache-free].