Grass-fed Beef

At first glance, this meaty sacrifice to the God of Gibberish went straight over my head. 'Grass-fed beef', went my brain, 'reasonable to the point of mundane'. After all, what else would you give beef? Skittles? Don't make me laugh.

And so, another of poor language's loopholes is ruthlessly exploited for economic gain. This particular one reads: 'people won't notice if you change the noun to one that makes no contextual sense, but means vaguely the same thing'. The effect is much the same in 'drinking a can'. It can't help but suggest that we all have throats made of the rears of bin lorries.

To be fair, butchers have good reason for making the most of this linguistic blind-spot. Let's just admit it, the mental image of two dozen succulent 14,000 oz steaks (in my head they've got googly eyes) glazing in the sun's rays and nibbling a carpet of dew-splashed grass is both mouth-watering and charming. The image of actual cows doing the same may be charming (in a post-cardish kind of way), but it doesn’t titillate the taste buds.

For me, the image of cows in a field provokes a number of emotions and associations, none of which make me any more likely to take a trip to the butchers. 1. Revulsion: cows smell and shit on the floor. 2. Nostalgia: The toy farmyards of youth and any number of bovine cartoon characters. 3. Irritation: My shoes are muddy and the stile is right over the other god-damn side of the field. 4. A vague sense of tiredness: I'm empathetic and I know that somewhere nearby there's a farmer getting up early.

But it's good old-fashioned guilt that gives the food industry its main justification for butchering the written word. I don't want to eat cows. I want to eat pieces of cow on a plate. Anonymous morsels of cow called beef. Nobody ever milked beef. Nobody ever fed it grass. The best thing militant vegetarians could ever do for their cause would be to get legislation passed that enforces far stricter regulations around false advertising. If all restaurants were suddenly obliged to explain what was on your plate without the aid of linguistic subterfuge, we carnivores would all be fucked.

Menu

Starter: The brazed flesh of the Easter Bunny.

Main: A hunk of cow ass, swimming in a river of its own red blood cells. Desert: A million fish eggs.

Bon appetit, murderers.