Product Packaging #2

Note, added August 2, 2011: You are probably here because you clicked through from some mass-scale, assembly-line link provider such as The Browser or The Morning News. Though their selection criteria remain utterly mysterious to me, occasionally these people link to my work, whereupon the traffic to my site quintuples like the Dionne children. But why not take some curatorial initiative of your own, dear readers? This website is a great place to start. In fact, the great majority of other posts you'll find here are vastly more interesting than this little bagatelle about Yocco the Hot Dog King. I recommend for example this essay on the philosophical history of dogs, for starters. If that doesn't do it for you, something else will. But you simply must stay a while.

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Surely there must be a name, in advertising parlance, for the figure of the anthropomorphized food item that happily consumes a non-anthropomorphized version of itself? I first noticed Yocco years ago when driving through central Pennsylvania, and I admit he's haunted me ever since. What could he be thinking? What would existence as Yocco, the Hot Dog King, be like? 

He is delighted, it is clear, but does his delight flow from the fact that human beings, the true anthropomorphs, enjoy eating his lesser brethren, the hot dogs that were destined to remain mere hot dogs? Or is he delighted because he himself is free to eat his lesser brethren? Do they constitute him, like the subjects of Hobbes's Leviathan? Is Yocco aware of this? Does Yocco not know what, exactly, he is? And, if he does, does it not horrify him?

Of course, autophagy is an old trope of advertising. We see it in abundance on the signs outside barbecue joints: the pig joyfully digging into a plate of pork, or, even more absurdly, the pig delighted to present itself as an already prepared pork product. Now the former possibility is not all that unverisimilar: pigs do resort to cannibalism regularly and without qualms. They will eat their own offspring alive, if circumstances dictate; and they will certainly eat pork by-products if these are what industrial agriculture puts on the menu.

But the second figure, the figure of the pig as pork that delights in being transformed into pork: that is something that warrants pause. The image from the advertisment for the Auvergne sausagemakers was so captivating that for a long time I did not even bother with the text. It is only now, in looking at this ad for the first time after  many months, that I begin to wonder: why is it a virtue of sausage that it does not cause 'fatigue'? Was sausage consumption something that was thought, in traditional French culture, to tire a person out? Anyway, it's clear that the cochon d'Auvergne is above all delighted to be serving himself, delighted at his own transformation, which is here conceptualized not so much as death, but as a moving on, up the scale of being, towards a higher purpose. It is true reincarnation, with an emphasis on the carn-.

And all the more so, when, as in Yocco's case, the animal by-product not only relishes its by-product status, but is transformed by his own consumption of other animal by-products into something that is no longer by-product, but rather an articulated being, with a face, limbs, perhaps internal organs. Some sort of cycle has been completed in Yocco, whose regal nature seems to flow from his spontaneous re-organization into a properly organic being, a being that can be considered not just qua mass but also qua structure.

This completion of this cycle proves remarkably effective for the sale of animal by-products, particularly for consumption by children. Consider the dinosaur chicken nugget. Scraps of who-knows-how-many birds are brought together to form the effigy of a single bird ancestor, a single bird ancestor, that is, which, like Yocco, can be imagined to have all its working parts in order. It is in fact a very simple form, all that is really discernible are a head and a tail, perhaps two or three legs, but this already gives the imagination enough to perceive it as a structure rather than a mass, as a being rather than a congeries of flesh from multiple beings. And this is enough to give it a  regal presence on the child's dinner plate: even the gentle, vegetarian brontosaurus, who never ate meat but is now thrown into being as meat, seems to be a sort of king.

Here we have something even more complex going on than in the case of either Yocco or the cochon d'Auvergne: an individual of an extinct species that is given new life, both as an individual and as a species, through the molded remains of several individuals of an extant species. Does it know what exactly it is? If it does, does this horrify it?

None of these figures --need I point out?-- comes up in the packaging and vending of the foods of the vegetable kingdom. We have the Mannerist masterpieces of Arcimboldo (which I've never liked, for what it's worth), showing men as arrangements of fruit. But this is trompe l'oeil; it's an attempt to show how you can make one thing look like another. Yocco by contrast involves no trumpery. What is of interest here is not making one thing stand in for another, not a relation of resemblance, but rather one of constitution. Meat, (gen. carnis, nom. caro) constitutes  a  body, while fruit can only ever stand in for the body. Meat serves itself in the service of a higher cause, and the regal symbol of this higher cause is meat reformed into an animate, articulated being.

I suspect there is much more to be said about the similarities between the take-out bag from the central Pennsylvania hot-dog joint and Abraham Bosse's frontispiece for Hobbes's definitive work on the body politic, which would take us a long way toward understanding our peculiar relationship to animals and the meat they produce. But I'll leave this as a mere soupçon, for now, as I've already gone well beyond the original scope I had set up for this occasional series of reflections upon product packaging.

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Comments

[Stephen]

And then, to go even farther afield, if we follow Carol Adam's The Sexual Politics of Meat, there are countless gender messages encoded in the anthropomorphization of animals. For instance, Adams points out that animals qua predators are almost invariably "he," animals qua prey are almost invariably "she," and animals qua inert food product are almost invariably "it." So the "he" hot dog here consumes the "it" hot dogs, while the sausage pig is remarkably androgynous (as far as human anatomical features, I would classify it as "male" in some respects and "female" in others). This apparent androgyny should not be surprising, since the pig is portrayed as simultaneously hunter and prey, while a neutered product sits off to the side. Also, notice the blue (hence, most likely male) brontosaurus getting ready for a meal of un-gendered (and un-featured) dinosaurs.

[VL Brandt]

I recently stumbled across the work of Kristin Dombek (Princeton, English Dept), who wrote a piece called "Murder in the Theme Park: Evangelical Animals and the End of the World" (published in The Drama Review, Spring 2007). The Left Behind series apparently portrays the kingdom of heaven as a place where animals volunteer to be butchered:

"… the utopian butchering depicted in the series’ final pages is easy, relatively clean, and divinely ordained. … In the millennial kingdom, then, no longer do humans have to hunt, for all animals are docile and turn themselves over for killing whenever humans need food. Now that the Beast is gone, humans will no longer need to be martyrs; the only skin to be cut, the only bodies slaughtered and on display, will be those of nonhuman animals."

Is this the "she wanted/asked for it" argument often deployed against victims of rape being played out in the realm of animals?

Both the advertisements you call attention to and the curious features of heaven posited by pop evangelicalism suggest to me that we are so uncomfortable killing beings we (at least unconsciously) recognize as sentient that we project a desire to be eaten (or raped) onto the victims. In other words, I read these ads as attempts to expiate guilt.

As for "mange sans fatigue" -- it could be meant to convey that one can eat the sausages without tiring of _them_ (as opposed to other brands that might be so rich one can eat only a few bites).

[Particlenparcel]

You must never have had a Yocco's hot dog, Justin. One of their grilled hot dogs topped with chili sauce, chopped onions and mustard will make you forget all about the creepy signs.

[Stuart]

Brings to mind Joseph Campbell's distinction between hunter and planter mythologies. The myth of the hunt usually features a never-killed ideal of the prey with whom the hunters have a relationship-- the bull bison who leads his herd over the cliff to provide meat in exchange for resurrection magic, for example. So Yocco is an atavism, a charm to ensure that next year will bring more hot dogs.

[Ross]

You need to search YouTube for Pepperami adverts from the UK.

[Picador]

Serendipitously, I was just browsing through the archives of the webcomic "Simulated Comic Product", which treats these themes in several of its strips, most notably:

http://robotandghost.com/nggallery/page-28/image/269/

but also, on a related note:

http://robotandghost.com/nggallery/page-27/image/182/

"Meat, carnis, constitutes a body, while fruit can only ever stand in for the body."

I'm not sure this is true. Consider the Jolly Green Giant, or any of a number of vegetable-themed mascots (I seem to remember a cauliflower-headed one?), or even some of the McDonald's characters composed of french fries, or a combination of meat and bread. Consider also animal crackers. Although, now that I think about it, the autophagic aspect is missing from these depictions: the Jolly Green Giant is a sort of tyrant who sells his own subjects to their doom, but he does not eat them himself. Likewise, in the McDonaldland ecosystem, there seems to be a separation between predator (e.g. Hamburglar) and prey (the food-item beings). Still, the relationship in these cases is often not far from the ambiguous lip-smacking of the dinosaur, or the self-carving pig, shown above.

[Immaculatecontraptions]

The Browser is assembly-line? Really?

DAJ

[Latex gloves]

Now days there are many of the products are running a good competition in the market. As per my view the only point of its competition is its packaging each and every product in the market is so much distinctive and very much beautiful which is increasing day to day competition. So it is very essential to have a weight of whatever products you are buying.

[Wheat Flour Milling]

I also experienced the same problem. The problem was mainly on the site configuration. I had the wrong configuration on the Mollum. But its working well now!

[pto pellet mill for sale]

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