Piggy in the middle

Truly one of my more bizarre childhood recollections: The happy-go-lucky-all-the-way-to-the-slaughterhouse "pre-ham" pigs from the Frosty Morn commercials.

"The height of a piggy's ambition/ from the day he is born [cue stork]/ is to hope he will be good enough [cue halo]/ to be a Frosty Morn!"

I swear I had no idea what these singing pork chops were on about when I used to see this TV commercial circa 1964 or so. Not that it would have mattered so much. They were just so darn cute! Who gave much thought to the their enslaved status, their worshipping of their oppressor, or their imminent execution? Not I. Please pass the bacon.

I kid, I kid. While I think the modern meat business is a dirty one, I do, nevertheless, participate in it--although I do try to buy organic, grass-fed, free-range, small-batch, what-have-you whenever I can, and mostly succeed. But I can afford to do so. Most of the time.

While this commercial is rather macabre (Who was the intended audience? Children who were afraid to eat breakfast meat? Wouldn't the adorable, harmonizing pigs have the opposite effect and swear them off sausage for life?), I can't get as worked up about the pork underbelly of it all as some might. Do a Google search for "frosty morn commercial" and about the third or fourth result is for a blog called "Suicide Food," which, as far as I can tell, is dedicated to decrying the use of cartoon animals to sell food by having them praise themselves on how delicious they will taste.

Yes, that is a strange, strange genre of advertising, one excellently parodied by an old Saturday Night Live cartoon commercial for Cluckin' Chicken--"And then they pluck me and boil me in oil! I'm delicious!" That's how I remember it, at least. Not sure that's ever actually said, but someone obviously picked up on this subtext--animals appraising their tasteworthiness before giving themselves up to the gas oven--and dove undercover into the dark comedy.

But the Frosty Morn pigs are cartoons, not actual pigs hell-bent on self-destruction and self-loathing. Thus it's hard for me to see how they're committing suicide. Technically, others--that is to say, humans--are killing them. Wouldn't then this be more the case of "Martyred Food"? But even still: They are cartoon pigs.

Semantics aside, is there an actual subtext? "Eat meat! The pigs don't mind!" I dunno. Methinks if you're going down that path, you've had one too many literary or social theory classes in grad school--Derrida to the left of me, Gramsci to the right, here I am, stuck in the middle with no job prospects and too much time on my mind. Honestly, it's not like kids had to be sold on eating meat in 1964. Pretty much everybody was doing it already, at least in the South, rural or otherwise, where these commercials aired.

Today, sure, I could see the TV ad being all about the subtext--the elfin boy leads the pigs in song signifies (not just "means" but "signifies") that the human dominates the animal and makes the animal perform for his entertainment and yield to his will. It's a form of "porcine othering." Post-colonial agriculture if you will.

But in 1964, the only subtext wasn't even much of a subtext: Buy our brand of meat because our pigs are happy!

That's not oppression. That's capitalism.

Admittedly, the difference is hard to tell somedays.