baby on plate

Steven Poole writes:

It is an interesting question, meanwhile, why the word "baby" in menu descriptions does not disgust us. Surely the last things we want to eat are babies. But perhaps once we are lulled into an imaginative world where a "baby" lamb or the "baby" queen scallop can be "resting" (in the scallop's case, resting itself on another baby, this time a "baby gem", since vegetables too – baby carrots, baby greens – can share in the general babyhood of all nice things, and participate in tottering towers of babies all stacked up for our gastric enjoyment), we are cocooned in such a euphemistic dream that the incipient act of putting these "baby" organisms into our mouths doesn't register as the horrific dissonance it otherwise might.

Babies are young, tender, helpless and succulent. The last thing we want to eat are old people, even though consumption of their beating hearts may transfer their courage and survivor smarts to ouselves. Babies also start appearing on menus at the upper end of the scale. They can therefore be interpreted as a celebration of successful predation. The poor eat chips. The rich eat babies. The weak are meat. The strong are hungry.

Comments

[belle le triste]

Not entirely convinced by this argument -- or actually by the sound of this larger project -- much as I like SP's work: BUT it did lead me to discover that the opposite of a euphemism is a cacophemism.

[jamie]

I do think the baby thing is odd, but I agree that 'wanker in restaurant is wanker' is pretty thin stuff to spread over a book.

[BenSix]

BR Myers had a similar piece in The Atlantic last year. It's good for a laugh or two, though the opening sentence is liable to have one thinking, “No, we haven't.”

[hellblazer]

I'm probably homing in on the least trenchant part of Poole's piece, but the story of his friends going on a "The Trip" trip strikes me as particularly depressing. (It also has a whiff of the Hari about it, though that could just be me.)

[Alex]

Meh, when I got to the bit where he starts taking the piss out of pretensious menus I was wondering if the Grauniad had somehow mis-attributed a lost Miles Kington column.

[Phil]

"Man sees thing which looks ridiculous, writes it up and makes it sound ridiculous" is certainly more Paul Jennings than George Orwell. Perhaps it's Poole's new direction.