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The Meat Epitaph
- The University of Akron Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
107 the meat epitaph This is what it was: Sometime in the recent but until now unrecorded past, it wasdecidedbycattleranchersthatsincepeoplewereincreasinglyinsistentthat “you are what you eat,” all cattle on the way to market were to be marked with brief descriptivetagsnotingthefavoritefoodof eachbeast,andhowmucheach ateof it.This,itwasfelt,wouldbothdelightthedinerandcomforttheconsumer: people would be able to tell exactly what kind of flavor and texture beef they were purchasing beforehand, and always secure exactly the kind of product most likely to delight their taste. (It was something a little like our present-day systemof cateringtopreferencesforlightanddarkmeatinchicken.)Thesystem set up seemed ideally efficient: first, they attached the tag to each beast on its lastdayontheranch,justbeforethetwoorthreedaysrequiredforshipmentto the slaughterhouse—during which travel time the animal customarily doesn’t eat anything, anyway. Once at the slaughterhouse, they carefully removed the tags;andduringtheslaughtering,duplicatedtheso-called“parenttag”numerous times, preparing perhaps hundreds of tiny tags for each animal. Directly after, atthepackingplant,thesewereaffixedtotheproperparts,eachsectionof each animal being separately and appropriately tagged, each as if with an epitaph. But something went wrong with this means of augmenting the diner’s delight and of comforting the consumer. At first, quite predictably, the tags came out readingthingslike“Muchgrass,alittlemoss,mediumgrain”and“Muchgrass, much grain, generally ate a lot.” And this, as one might expect, proved a great pleasure to the consumer. But then tags began coming through reading things like “A little grass, small grain, many diverse scraps from our table”: And “She was our favorite, gave her all we had to give”; and there was one (featured at dinnertimeoneeveningonnationaltelevisionnews)saying,“Goodbye,Blackie Lamb,sorryyouhadtogrowup—we’llmissyou.”Gradually,despiteitsefficiency, this system somehow ceased to delight the diner and comfort the consumer. And this is how the practice of the meat epitaph began to become generally neglected during the course of time, and how people came to eat their meat, as they generally do today, partially or wholly blindfolded. ...