I won’t show you a picture of my finger after the chop saw shaved the side off while I was doing my DIY parquet flooring. I won’t show you the strange, raw, lumpy, exposed flesh or the oozing blood. It’s pretty gruesome, like a horror film. When it happened, at first, for a few seconds, it was like a carved ham. Pinkish white. Sliced. It didn’t hurt at first, while my brain was figuring out what happened. I just looked at it, confused. Then all at once a flood of blood came, and I screamed. After a good 10 minutes it started to really hurt, to sting. You know the pain; we’ve all had a stingy flesh wound before. It was like that, but worse. After my trip to A&E and a night in a thick bandage, when the bleeding was under control, it looked more like the steak or sausages or minced beef down the meat isle. As it started to heal and form granulation tissue it looked like streaky bacon. Some people squirm when I tell them what happened, but they want to see the wound, though they wince at the sight of it. Some people recoil in disgust and horror and refuse to look, beg me not to show them. Some of those people are the same people who walk down the meat isle and pick out a pink or red, bloody, raw, fleshy steak, or arrange layers of similarly sliced ham on a plate with figs and grapes as a treat with their wine. The same people who put parts of an animal, similar to my finger, into their mouths and chew it and swallow it. I tell them they should see my finger and lick their lips and feel their stomach calling for food, and it disgusts them. I tell them I smelled my finger to see if it smelled like the body parts the butcher sells to them. They find it revolting. Why? Because eating body parts is disgusting to us, but the body parts we buy from the butchers have been rebranded as food so we don’t have to think about it; because we are detached from what we are eating. Next time you walk down the meat isle, think of my finger, trimmed down the side, bloody and stingy and swollen, nerves severed by the angry wheel and the giant teeth of a chop saw. Think of the chop saw slitting the throat of a living chicken. Think of the nipples and ears of sheep being torn off during sheering. Think of the violent bolt shot into the head of an innocent baby pig. Think of the times when the bolt is ineffective and the poor cow’s legs are amputated while they they are conscious. Think of the sharp knife used to slice the skin of a fox before its skin is peeled back while it’s alive. Think about it, and ask what’s the difference? See the flesh on your plate and the flesh on your body. Are we not made of the same flesh? Do we not have the same blood and nerves? Do we not feel the same horror?
Leave a Reply