Meat

As I walk around the city I am struck by all the cartoon images and lighting. It as if the city was designed by an eight year old. Albeit, a horny eight year old who's a devout Evangelical Christian; because there is also a ridiculous amount of near naked women and crosses (what a confused little eight year old).

However, it is the cartoon images that I am going to focus on in this post. It is because the majority of the cartoon images are of cows, pigs, ducks, chickens, octopus, eels and fish. The animals are plastered on the top of a majority of restaurants and then bellow is poorly lit photo of the animals meat on top of broth and vegetables (if all I saw were these poorly lit photos juxtaposed to the professional looking photos of fast food restaurants, then I would never eat good food). The cartoon animals on these restaurants always have enormous smiles and seem to be ecstatic that you are about to eat them.

So I got to thinking why in a society that absolutely loves cartoons (the Simpsons and Sponge-Bob are incredibly popular) do they cartoonize these animals they are about to eat? Do they consciously or subconsciously make any connection between the food on their plate and the animals on the signs? Do they secretly have blood lust for killing the adorable cow?

I would imagine most Koreans do not make any connection between the cartoon animal and the food on their plate other then the fact that the cartoon pig signals that this place is selling pork. Further, the culture does a lot of repressing and my arm chair psychological analysis would guess that probably factors in to their love of cartoons. Finally, the Korean people have been treated terribly for decades and that perhaps caused them to crave all the treasures that they were neglected from throughout the years. These treasures include material objects and meat...pounds and pounds (or kilos and kilos) of meat.