(~3 minutes to read)
One story. Two treatments.
The topic is a news report that a UK supermarket is selling meat in touch-free packaging for squeamish people.
One article is a rant. The humour is sarcastic, some might say sardonic.
The alternative treatment below is much sillier, and is based on a mishearing of the headline.
Headline: Supermarket to sell ‘touch-free’ raw meat to cater for squeamish Millennials
A friend of mine recently told me about a grocery store’s initiative to protect us sensitive types from the horrors associated with food production. She was nursing a cold at the time (no doubt contracted from an infected surface, but you can’t avoid touching everything), and she told me that Sainsbury’s in the UK is to start selling touch-free beet to cater to squeamish billennials.
Uncooked food has always creeped me out. It doesn’t matter what it is—vegetable, fruit, or even grains—it’s obvious that violence has taken place to get it to the grocery stores.
Brussels sprouts have been hacked off their stems; potatoes have been ripped from the warm moist soil and their parent plants; bananas have been chopped off their trees—the very trees that gave life to them and nourished and protected them as little fingerlings, and those same bananas suffer a second trauma when they’re separated from their siblings to be sold individually or in small bunches.
And as for grains—they’ve had to endure the rigours of being processed in a combine harvester, the predecessor of which was called a “thresher” or “thrasher”. Horrific!
Cheese and milk are fine. There’s no obvious link to anything living (other than the bacteria and stuff in them – yeeuchh!!). And beef and pork don’t freak me out either—I mean, it doesn’t look like anything that lived or grew or whatever; it’s just… well, meat.
But everything else – eeughh! Fish; green onions; rabbit; turnips; chicken; green beans; duck; shrimp; raspberries… They’re all very recognizable, and as soon as I recognize them for what they are (or were), I get this overwhelming attack of the heebie jeebies.
I have to admit to being kind of on the fence with offal—liver, kidney, heart, lungs… To be honest, even though they’re reputedly from the insides of animals, they don’t look like much at all, but mmmmmmm they’re delicious!
Now, canned food and TV dinners—no problem—everything’s cooked and looks, smells, tastes and feels yummy. Ditto burgers and weiners.
Chicken fingers worry me bigly, although it’s mostly the name—“chicken” and “fingers”. I don’t need to be reminded what I’m eating. And it’s little wonder we never see live chickens with fingers; they’ve all had them cut off so we can eat them.
I wonder—do chicken fingers grow back again?
But do you know the thing that freaks me out the most?
Beet.
Their skins feel so… skin-like. And when you cut them, they bleed!
I love the taste of beets, but show me a whole beet and all I see and feel is the misery and cruelty that the beet must’ve suffered. The poor things have been allowed to grow almost to full maturity and then… Bam! In the prime of their lives, they’re ripped away from everything they’ve ever known and decapitated, like young teens being sacrificed on the altar of some barbarian god.
No; I’m glad that Sainsbury’s now offers touch-free beet for sale. Apparently, you just cut the wrapping and slide the beet into the pan or pot. I know deep inside of me that they’ve been treated as badly as beets ever have—probably worse, since they’ve had to be flayed before being wrapped in their touch-free coats, but at least I don’t have to touch them and feel their pain.
Thanks marketing people—I love you all!