Looks Go a Long Way
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 datesturkeys 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*
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