Turkey burger sure does disturb me.
Don’t get me wrong — I like it well enough. It’s horribly lean, tastes reasonably good, and is fairly cheap. It comes in pretty little green plastic tubes, frozen, and fits conveniently in my freezer. I can eat one without feeling guilty, and in a pinch, the frozen packages double as hammers.
It still disturbs the hell out of me, though.
It’s the idea of a turkey, that golden-plump bird sitting nestled in the middle of a silver platter, juices glistening on the crispy skin, the succulent flesh letting off slight puffs of steam as it waits, anticipating the first glorious slice of the cleaver, ready to fall apart into moist slices of happiness for the clamoring crowd at the table — now reduced to a ground-up meatpaste in a plastic tube.
The same aversion could be said for cows, but we’re rather used to consuming beef in the ground-up format. Nobody says, “Yeah, I’m having the family over. I went to the store and lugged home a 1,200 pound steer, I hope it’s enough,” and then tries to serve it with stuffing. We’re pretty much O.K. with the idea of a large animal like that converted to a more portable and moldable state, but something like a turkey, a duck, or a chicken is supposed to stay whole and recognizable.
Of course, this is because we don’t like chickens or turkeys, because they’re not cute. When you bake a chicken to perfection, it looks 183% nicer in its cooked, basted state than it ever did as an adult chicken, and turkeys aren’t exactly winning prom dates left and right, either. Render them naked, baked, and stuffed with dried bread, though, and boy howdy — have we got a looker. You’ll hear people walk around for days after Thanksgiving going, “Good lord, did you see the turkey Aunt Betty cooked up? I could have taken that bird to bed with me it looked so good.”
Rabbits, pheasant, deer, kangaroo, and other animals, however, we feel necessary to render unrecognizable, not so much for their size, but because they’re good-looking beasts. Nobody wants cooked rabbit to look like a rabbit, that fuzzy little bunny out in the lawn chewing madly on your carrot tops — no, make it look like CHICKEN, because then we feel better about eating an ugly animal that, clearly, had it coming anyway. I think this is also why manufacturers do not put cute cartoon characters of the animals on the packages of meat, as they’re afraid of upstaging the product by accident. “I think I’ll skip the, ‘Kuddly Kanga Ground Roo’, for now, thanks.”
And face it…Bambi scarred all of us as kids. You just couldn’t bring yourself to slice up a hot, steamy flank of doe-eyed deer on Christmas, not after losing his mother like that. Make it into jerky or sausage, though, and we’ll gnaw on it for weeks. For that matter, sausage takes any animal and any part of that animal and makes it into an attractive dish, as we are all well-aware of, but refuse to think about as we’re browsing for some wienies at the store.
So, as long as our food, as prepared, looks better than it did when it was alive, we’re ok; our food consumption is primarily based on the ignorance of its content anyway (preservatives, anyone?), so why not make it look attractive?
Turkey burger still freaks me out, though, but not enough to skip it.
*Gobble*
Great post, I just converted to vegetarianism!
I agree with the turkey burger, I have thought about vegetarianism -we are actually doing one dinner a week with no meat. It all started with watching the video “I saw earthlings” you might think twice about the meat you eat after you watch this.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=GhxKnys7Ryw
Trust me you don’t want to be eating a juicy burger while watching that.
chicken mince freaks me out.. i can’t touch the stuff!!
I love turkey burgers. A pinch of salt, couple grinds on the pepper mill, and a few shakes of the Worcestershire bottle, and we’re good to go. I’m trying to eat less red meat these days, but ingesting protein is still pretty high on my list of dietary necessities. I guess I should be eating more beans.
Barbara: Due to my post? Wow. I didn’t think it was THAT influential.
Joe: The problem with these videos is that they are purposely angled to give the worst possible face on the industry. That being said, am I the only one that watches these and goes, “Yeah, so what?” Slaughter of animals is how it works, folks. Sure, I don’t agree with treating animals like crap, but there’s real reasons for why things are done the way they are done. If you like your steak, it comes from somewhere. Don’t come weeping to me because someone had to KILL something to get it. Suck it up.
Mel: Chicken mince? That’s something I don’t think we get around here, but yeah, that’d be pretty disturbing, too.
Nicheplayer: I’m a big believer in the correct role of protein in my diet, and I know that when I eat some, I feel better and more satisfied than I do if I leave it out. I do attempt things like turkey burgers so that I’m ingesting less fat on occasion, and beans are good except for the after affects, which do not impress my wife.
Nathan,
It is not so much that they had to kill it, trust me I don’t have a problem with that, I think it is the way that they treat them. Sure it is not a pretty life for these animals but there is a line that does not need to be crossed in order to get the same result.
You are right that these videos have a certain point of view, I don’t see the problem in that. It is like their own blog post, but in video format.
Joe: It also depends on what you consider to be, “inhuman” treatment. Many people would consider leaving dogs outside on a cold winter’s night to be “inhumane”, and yet, this is something we’ve done for years and it isn’t cruel at all. It also depends on where you personally draw the line between what we are allowed to do to animals and what we are not, which is wide and varied, depending on who you talk to. You have those that feel only free range is the way to properly treat them, whereas some believe that fencing them in a small pen or stuffing them tightly in cages is fine, too. Each believe that they are treating animals humanely (usually), but each has a different standard for where they draw that line.
These videos are allowed, certainly, to present their point of view. I’m just saying that the POV is vastly skewed to one side, and folks would do well to look at other viewpoints before deciding for themselves what is right. These videos present themselves as objective documentaries when in fact they’re opinionated videos. That’s the part that gets my goat.