Naked lunch

People walk past an activist during an Animal Naturalis demonstration to promote vegetarianism in central Barcelona, December 15, 2011. (REUTERS/Albert Gea)

Boing Boing editor/partner and tech culture journalist Xeni Jardin hosts and produces Boing Boing's in-flight TV channel on Virgin America airlines (#10 on the dial), and writes about living with breast cancer. Diagnosed in 2011. @xeni on Twitter. email: xeni@boingboing.net.

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zombienietzsche

Killing vegetables? How terrible!!!
http://www.ecoevolution.org/ Ian G

ummm, the outward smear by her butt is a little….. disturbing
- http://www.xeni.net/ Xeni Jardin
  
  hahahha
- vonskippy
  
  There’s an image I didn’t need stuck in my mind.
  - Antinous / Moderator
    
    It’s just a gas blast runnel.
    - Xander
      
      So, it wasn’t just -me- seeing that? Whew.
soap

Wait. “Naked Lunch” and not David Pescovitz?

My brain hurts.
http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=8629512 Luis Lopez-Garcia

This is not effective in the least.
- calf
  
  It won’t win new converts, but one can’t deny that the imagery is provocative and memorable and kind of funny, and it doesn’t take that much thinking to start making connections with several related ideas and topics, for instance prehistoric cannibalism, or modern consumerism, or the American plate/diet. To that end, intellectually it is very effective.
  - rajma
    
    Anybody claiming that images of nude conventionally attractive women [in the context of a promotional campaign in the West] are provocative is either sheltered or kidding themselves. This imagery is used everywhere, in the sale of every concept imaginable. Honestly, its ubiquity is stunning.
    
    From the evidence on display, one can only assume the directors of this project are, at best, creatively bankrupt dolts. At worst, they are misogynist (and still dolts).
    - zombienietzsche
      
      Agreed.
    - http://profiles.google.com/bentobjects Terry Border
      
      Somewhat true, but it got on BoingBoing, so there’s that.
    - calf
      
      1. If you think mere nudity is supposed to be the provocative part, you’re the one who is missing the point. What is shocking and what is thought provoking are inequivalent sets. I gave three specific examples, and they had nothing to do with nudity.
      
      2. You disagree with what I said, and so allow only the most extremely interpretation of the word “provocative”. I.e. you’re fixating on one single piece of diction.
      
      To be clear:
      
      > Anybody claiming that images of nude conventionally attractive women
      
      I never claimed that. Your objections are sloppy and I find this extremely difficult to respond to.
      
      All the people who “Liked” your comment are being similarly misled. This is quite frustrating.
      - Iscah
        
        One can, in fact, deny that “the imagery is provocative, and memorable and kind of funny.” Rajma just did, and for very good reasons. It must be hard for you to find it frustrating that so many people disagree with you, and that you find hir claim to be difficult to respond to, but really, when images of nude, conventionally attractive women are associated with meat on a near-daily basis in an attempt to make some sort of ‘new’ and thus memorable statement about the moral nature of carnivorous consumption, or simply to sell more hamburgers, it no longer counts as provocative, is too derivative and banal to be memorable, and isn’t the least bit funny, especially if you bother to be troubled by the misogynistic dismissal of women as disposable or consumable flesh.
        
        Perhaps this sort of imagery is new to you. Lucky you. It is not so to the rest of us.
      - calf
        
        Again, rajma gave pretty sloppy reasons. What do you make of he/she putting words in my mouth? I never said anything about nudity; that was entirely their inclusion. For example, the subject could have been fully clothed or basted with makeup to resemble roasted chicken skin, and I would have still used the word provocative or some similar word. The idea of “thought-provoking” doesn’t require a high bar for its application, because it’s a pretty generic and well-known term. Again, I don’t know why rajma was fixating on this other than that they didn’t like what I said.
        
        > Perhaps this sort of imagery is new to you. Lucky you. It is not so to the rest of us.
        
        I think, like others, you’re focusing on the female nudity. I don’t think that is a fair evaluation. It could have been a naked man and still an interesting photo.
        
        > isn’t the least bit funny, especially if you bother to be troubled by the misogynistic dismissal of women as disposable or consumable flesh
        
        I do agree with this issue. However, you seem to have already decided that there was no ironic intent in the picture; irony and sarcasm are forms of humor. Therefore I don’t think my original choice of words in describing the photo was inaccurate.
        
        Maybe there’s a certain crowd on boingboing that is jaded, but I think they’re just a) failing to see things in a simpler light, and b) projecting their own pre-existing opinions on the comments of other people. I myself am new here and find this kind of hostility unwarranted. I must point out that the objective fact is this thread is 70+ comments long. Let me ask, how else do you want to measure provocativity?
  - http://mychemicaljourney.blogspot.com The Chemist
    
    I point you to this article in The Believer. Enjoy:
    http://www.believermag.com/issues/201102/?read=interview_francione
  - Halloween Jack
    
    The only thing that it provokes in me is pity for the woman who’s probably literally freezing her ass off in public for something that the vast majority of the public will instantly and properly categorize as yet another example of a certain publicity-loving segment of the animal rights movement’s perennial willingness to objectify women under the guise of making a point.
Christopher Miller

Why am I never there for stuff like this?
malthusan

asdf
soylent_plaid

So the message here is that meat is just like having an attractive, naked woman in my mouth?
ryuchi

Now, imagine this in US: at least five pigs tasering her ass simultaneously, three more pepper-spraying the girl, nudity charges, jail.
- http://twitter.com/twichy twichy
  
  You mean cooking and seasoning her? Of course!
- Antinous / Moderator
  
  ryuchi,
  
  Please reserve the word pig for people who have earned it.
  - http://mychemicaljourney.blogspot.com The Chemist
    
    In this context, my first impression was that of literal pigs.
  - DeargDoom
    
    You can become a police officer in the US without having to earn any qualifications? Wow, explains a lot.
  - ryuchi
    
    pig= police officer who tasers & paper sprays exuberantly – didn’t i express it clearly :D ??
Thomas Juette

nice hams…
Nash Rambler

This image actually made me hungry. She looks delicious!
GIFtheory

Some day I will figure out what compels young women to strip in the name of animal rights. And then I will tell no one.
- http://pulse.yahoo.com/_RORTZSJHWWFSAOR3SBPRSHWBTI B.
  
  Done and done.
thomilae

Aaaaand queue a gaggle of perverts by the Brussels sprouts. :
http://twitter.com/silentkpants Katrina Voll-Taylor

It’s a naked woman. Of course it is. It’s always women’s naked bodies being consumed by these goddammed protests as metaphors for the meat no one’s supposed to consume. Fucking hell, where all all the vegetarians who are feminists, too, who are sick of seeing women portrayed as if we exist as a lesser absent referent than animals are to (some) meat eaters. *disgruntled noises from an irritated vegetarian feminist*
- sarcasmatron
  
  Probably because having a sausage in the plate would look hypocritical.
- rattypilgrim
  
  I know I’m a cynic, but could it be the women who volunteer to be the nude metaphors are exhibitionists?
  - http://twitter.com/silentkpants Katrina Voll-Taylor
    
    Maybe so. But this does not answer for why the bodies of men who are exhibitionists are not used as frequently as women in these types of “statements,” and demonstrations.
    - Joel Phillips
      
      Based on these pictures it looks like the bodies of men are used, but the photographers (or picture editors) tend to focus on the women.
      - http://twitter.com/silentkpants Katrina Voll-Taylor
        
        That’s likely (and sadly) true. Yikes.
    - disillusion
      
      Do take into account that the gender of the subject can very well be another part of the message. Just look at how much meat we eat. We eat more chikcen than rooster, more cows than bulls, them using a female subject is their way of presenting it in a more anthropomorphic way than just throwing a person on the plate.
      
      Edit: ugh, hate how I can only get a message posted one in ten tries…
      - http://twitter.com/silentkpants Katrina Voll-Taylor
        
        “them using a female subject is their way of presenting it in a more anthropomorphic way than just throwing a person on the plate” The female subject in this photograph looks a lot like a person. Who they threw on a plate.
      - AlexG55
        
        Really? I always thought that, certainly with beef, the vast majority of animals we eat are male. The females are useful for milk, and also one male can mate with several females- a herd of one bull and 100 cows gives you 100 calves, a herd of 100 bulls and one cow only gives you one.
      - doco
        
        The term “chicken” is gender neutral. And chickens hatch out about 50/50 male/female. The chickens bred for meat production are butchered about half hens (female) and half roosters (male). If you look at the number of pounds of meat, it is probably tilted towards roosters a bit because the males tend to grow a bit faster and bigger. If you look at those bred for egg production, the males are often euthanized as chicks. Then hens are then butchered after they no longer produce much for eggs. Those hens are too tough for whole chicken parts so instead are used for processed chicken (pot-pie, chicken soup, etc)
        
        For cattle – again we get about 50/50 balance of male/female. The bull (male) are usually made into steers (neutered male) and raised for quick sale as meat. Some females are raised just for their meat, but others are kept to be bred and raise more. For some breeds the females are raised and kept for milk production. When the cows (female with more than one calf) are too old they are butchered generally for processed beef (hamburger).
- benher
  
  Maybe because everybody (including feminists) loves women?
musesum

Well, after switching the object and subject, this reminds me of Ann Simonton, who helped chase the Miss California pagent out of Santa Cruz. Not many pictures of her wearing the bologna dress, this is the closest I found: http://neurocritic.posterous.com/the-new-york-times-magazine-year-in-ideas-ver
- Will Bueche
  
  Wow, I haven’t heard the name Ann Simonton in 20+ years, but I believe that it was she who guest-lectured a class at UCSC which I attended. She claimed that photography depicting women promotes violence against women. I recall the lecture because even as a freshman I could not believe what propaganda she was presenting – and by propaganda I mean dubious logic and a sliver of cherry-picked images to support her conclusion. Thanks for mentioning her name now, for now that the internet exists I was able to read her wiki entry, and now I understand why she reached for that conclusion – and how logic had nothing to do with it.
  - http://twitter.com/gordonjcp gordonjcp
    
    Wait, what, *photography* depicting women? Not pornography, but photography? So, the photo at the top of the page, or Katrina Voll-Taylor’s forum avatar a thread back promotes violence against women?
    
    I’m guessing she was also pretty upset that few people take her seriously…
    - Will Bueche
      
      Not just pornography, any art of nude women that depicts the character(s) with any range of emotions or conditions or story elements that portray them as anything other than strong and super. I recall one of her slides showed a woman who appeared to have survived a shipwreck or something because she’d managed to wash up on a beach, and there were some pearls nearby that the figure was reaching for. It appeared to be some kind of statement about vanity, in that the character had evidently lost everything but wanted the jewels, or maybe she was meant to have no sense of what is valuable, or maybe her pursuit of jewels led her to fall of a boat and wash up on shore. Who knows. But she said the photo celebrated the death of a woman on a beach.
      
      I wouldn’t trust her to interpret any art, not with her foregone conclusion about what it all means. It is a common mistake that amateur critics make when they assume that any statement about a subject that an artist makes is an endorsement of that subject, rather than a call to think about that subject.
      
      Soap, just read her Wiki and reach your own conclusions. What seems evident is she was attacked on her way back from a modeling gig. She blamed her profession for her attack – or for cultivating the mindset of her attackers. Ergo, better not model. Better warn the whole world not to model! Better consider that it is all a conspiracy to cultivate a mindset in which women can be attacked! Some traction to that idea, in that there is certainly art – and advertising – which does depict women as weak, and it is indeed trying to sell an image of what women “are”, which is limited and constraining and objectionable if it were meant to be the sum total of the person’s (character’s) existence. But a sensible person knows that people “are” everything – weak to strong, happy to angry, perfect to imperfect, etc., and would not try to stop the depiction of some aspects of the human condition out of the belief that people are too stupid to know anything but what bands of conditions they see in art.
  - soap
    
    Dare I ask your impression of “why she reached for that conclusion”?
not a doktor

Really this is working on the assumption that people are inherently repulsed by cannibalism, when Armin Meiwes and the internet vore community could tell you otherwise.
Daniel Roy

Relevant Onion is relevant:

http://www.theonion.com/video/advocacy-group-decries-petas-inhumane-treatment-of,14359/
- ecologist
  
  Even more ironic was the ad that preceded the video the first time I linked to it — an ad for take-on airline food featuring a woman admiring a burrito with the handsome shirtless male model protruding from it, challenging her (insert Spanish accent) “are you ready for something spicy? …”
  - http://celesteagnes.blogspot.com/ Sekino
    
    That’s irony alright. Just another indication that using nekkid people has been done to death and for every single message one wants to push, to the point of utter contradiction.
Zac

I haven’t heard of this fetish yet. They do it on vegetables?
alephxero

If you don’t eat your meat, you can’t have any pudding!
- Paul Renault
  
  Shakey puddin?
  
  plus: How come they never seem to have these kinds of demonstrations in, say, Tuk, eh?
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuktoyaktuk
http://samehadaku.blogspot.com/ samehadaku

haha..I want to eat it
Joey deBlois

And now I want bacon.

Fail, Veggie-heads, fail.
http://twitter.com/gordonjcp gordonjcp

It’s all very well but we don’t – across the world, please don’t just tell me about your backyard – have enough room to grow enough food for everyone to be vegetarian. The vast majority of the world’s livestock are not fed on corn from rolling mid-west cornfields, and don’t live in ploughed-up rain forests. In the west we do eat too much cheap, poor-quality meat, but it’s an essential part of our diet and like everything else we should be farming in an ecologically considerate way. This does *not* involve getting rid of all the cows, sheep and pigs, and then having to pump billions of gallons of petrochemical-derived fertiliser onto the land.

The oil might run out. We’re not going to run out of gas though because enough of it is emitted – in a fairly carbon-neutral way – from decomposing animal manure (human excrement would work too but you can’t use it as fertiliser because it’s very hard to kill all the pathogens). Even at that, we are likely to be back to horse-drawn ploughs within a generation or two. The vegans are going to starve when the oil runs out.
- guanto
  
  I’m not sure the facts agree with you here. For starters, the most-produced meat in the world is pork which doesn’t graze but is instead raised industrially and is for the most part fed food that could be fed to humans much more efficiently (you need at least 6 kg of corn or soy to produce 1 kg of pork). China is the world’s largest meat producer, producing mostly pork in, you guessed it, urban or suburban facilities. Then you have the US where, again, pork is the largest item, being mostly produced in Smithfield-like meat factories.
  
  As for beef (cattle actually does graze), the world’s largest exporter is Brazil. In Brazil, cattle have to compete with crops such as soy for newly cleared land since soy production is much more efficient than beef production.
  
  In fact, meat consumption is a sign of wealth around the world. Some of the richest countries consume the most meat per capita while the poorest countries consume almost no meat, instead relying on a quasi-vegetarian diet. Your “grazing goat in the backyard” scenario constitutes a minuscule part of overall meat production.
  
  Bottom line: raising crops is almost always cheaper and more efficient (in terms of land area required) than producing meat. (Unless you’re talking about some nomad desert tribe, but again, negligible contribution to the world’s meat production.)
  
  NB: vegetarian != vegan.
  - soap
    
    Bottom line: raising crops is almost always cheaper and more efficient (in terms of land area required) than producing meat.
    
    True assuming all land is suitable for row crops.
    
    You see this in the USA quite clearly. Iowa, Indiana, (flat) Ohio are full of corn and beans, because the climate/soil/terrain are suitable.
    
    Grazing ivestock are much more common in the hills where the terrain is unsuitable for row cropping, and in places like North Dakota where the climate doesn’t pair well with high-yield crop varieties.
    
    If measuring accessible plate-calories per acre livestock are actually more efficient than plants in large parts of the world. The caloric inefficiencies of corn-fed livestock is a testament to the wealth (and squander) of industrialized nations, not to the underlying calculus.
    - chgoliz
      
      Grazing livestock is mostly a fantasy in the US. Cattle are cooped up tightly together, far from any grasses, fed corn and soy — which they’re not supposed to eat — so then they have to be given antibiotics and other medicines to help them deal with the poor health and gastro-intestinal issues that result. And then there’s the methane.
      
      Areas that cannot grow corn and soy locally have it shipped in, or they operate their ranches on a much smaller scale.
      - soap
        
        Come to the Dakotas, Kansas, Montana…
        
        Heck, come anywhere 120+ day corn isn’t going to happen.
        
        The US grazes plenty of cattle. You are simply incorrect. Do no not confuse corn finished with corn raised.
        
        We don’t bale the interstate RoW to feather our beds!
    - guanto
      
      Hence the “almost.” I was just trying to debunk the OP’s sweeping generalizations (“vast majority” etc.).
      
      See, I actually live in a country that is two thirds mountains with cows everywhere you look. We almost exclusively consume domestic meat. Guess what, beef accounts for a whopping 18% of meat consumption, the rest being mostly pork and poultry.
      
      Fact is, people in high-population countries with limited resources don’t eat a lot of meat. Meat didn’t stop the massive famines in India (very high population density, limited arable land) and Pakistan, wheat did.
      - ali
        
        “I actually live in a country that is two thirds mountains with cows everywhere you look. We almost exclusively consume domestic meat.”
        
        Just in case this country happens to be Switzerland it should be mentioned that this is due to the state protecting domestic farmers from any foreign competition (for long there was an almost de facto import prohibition) and resulting ridiculously high meat prices. It is not motivated by a worry for the environment or the animals but comes out of a concern for the income of the mythical farmer.
        
        But perhaps you live somewhere else. Anyway I agree with you to a large extend. I just have a reflex against Swiss rural romanticism, that’s all. Sorry.
  - http://twitter.com/gordonjcp gordonjcp
    
    No, because that only works *if* you have land suitable for arable farming in the first place. The vast majority of the world’s farmland isn’t terribly suitable for arable farming on the scale you’d require for everyone to be vegetarian.
    
    If you’ve got a cunning scheme for making a typical Scottish Highlands hill farm into an arable farm with rolling waves of amber grain then I’d love to see it.
    - guanto
      
      Again, you’re missing the fact that much of the world eats very, very little meat (cause, guess what, raising livestock is too expensive and resource-intensive, no matter how you slice it; difficult terrain doesn’t exactly help). A meat-heavy diet is _generally_ the privilege of at least moderately wealthy people.
      
      Look, there’s no way you could support your statement with facts, let alone your “vast majority of the world’s livestock” claim (which is especially specious). You really don’t have to justify eating meat; it’s perfectly acceptable in today’s world.
      - guanto
        
        Also, since I don’t quite know how to respond to baseless stabs in the dark, I’ll leave you with a Scientific American article about findings of actual scientists in this field; in other words, people who actually know what they’re talking about. This is how they suggest we could double food production by 2050: “The steps are as follows: improve crop yields, consume less meat, reduce food waste, stop expanding into rainforests, and use fertilizer and water more efficiently.” http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=foley-global-food-production-reduce-environmental-damage-maps
sean

Not well-done enough for me.
social search

if there is a naked animal then it will be a common thing.. but if we see a human the we are getting shocked .. why ?
- EvilSpirit
  
  Because the human has neither been skinned nor plucked. Totally unpalatable.
Ambiguity

In distinction of the Bansky post the other day, this one seems, er, well done.
IsoTop

I wonder if one of the women on the left of this display volunteer to participate in their next naked on a plate demonstration what would they say…
http://www.facebook.com/gimiche Guy Michaud

To me with salt & pepper all over her body it would have been really disgusting
Jeffety

I’ve visited Barcelona. Maybe she was just pickpocketed…
Propaganda

Meat is murder.

Delicious, delicious murder.
bkad

Maybe I’m the only dense one here, but if I saw this on the street, I would have no idea that it was about vegetarianism. I’m not sure I would even assume it had a message. When it is pointed out, I can see: it’s saying that because people are made out of meat, and you wouldn’t eat people, maybe you shouldn’t eat meat. I’m not sure I would figure that out on my own.

[edit: caption says this was part of a protest. If I were around bunch of protesters, I'd be more likely to look for the message in the art. So I WOULD figure it out.]
- Guest
  
  *redacted*
http://mychemicaljourney.blogspot.com The Chemist

The fun part about reading all these comments is the realization that the format does overpower the message. Evidenced by the numerous arguments about whether or not it does.
- benher
  
  Also because it’s Boingboing. ;)
  Frankly, I thought it was just supposed to be a cute girl on a plate with salad…
eryximachus

‘Meat is murder!’

These people have never watched a nature special, have they… The world spins on ‘murder’.
http://moreapplesaday.com/ Peter Filak

Excellent picture, even a cow walking around on the plate should suffice. I do not consider myself an animal activist, and many don’t, but can recognize that killing these animals is both unnecessary and detrimental to our health. Eat well and LIVE longer we will!
Marco Antonio Morales

A dead cow hacked up in bloody bits and thrown on that plate: THAT would have more shock value, a message and might put off some people from consuming meat.

Right now it’s a useless, masturbatory stock photo that says nothing, and achieves even less. (Beautiful and sexy, but useless.)

A better example: (translation: “Here is the rest of your fur coat”)
http://greenmob.com.mx/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/pieles.jpg
http://theladyfingers.blogspot.com/ Ladyfingers

What? I’m sorry, I was trying to see her privates.
Anon_Mahna

My first thought was it was someone’s art piece/social commentary on western society’s attitude towards women. Veggicidal people do amuse me greatly.
EricT

Take that, emotionally distant father!
Culturedropout

I’d eat it.
TheMudshark

If you want “disgusting human on a plate” done right check this out:
http://evancampbell.deviantart.com/art/Funeral-meat-253796271
peter jackson

I like eat Veg. …………. Sorry, I don’t like Non-Veg.
http://twitter.com/malcolmjackson ♡ Malcolm Jackson

Fun. E !