This comment of the day was by Brett Wolff on the post “‘Why Do We Have ‘Fish Sandwiches’ but no ‘Bird Sandwiches’ or ‘Mammal Sandwiches’?“
Great article. It made me think about what it means to take a food item with real production/collection impacts in the real world and turn it into an abstract food commodity. We no longer have any sense of where it came from, how it got here, or even what it is, so how would we ever possibly be critical of the supply chain that “produced” it? Although “fish sandwich” is one of the vaguest of generic food items, to a certain extent all “chicken,” “beef,” etc. is treated similarly. We speak and act as if there is a big factory somewhere that magically and efficiently pushes out fish, chicken breasts, and ground beef, when the reality is actually much less Ford and much more Updike. It’s another way of disconnecting us and making it difficult to ask specific critical questions. Again–thanks for pointing out something I had not really thought about before.
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Photo: Ludovic Bertron / flickr