All animals are equal - but is the pig more equal?

Why sausage is embarrassing, but fish sushi is cool
- The moral double standard of postmodern eating

If Orwell were alive today, writing about gastronomic trends instead of pigs, this is probably how the new Animal farm:
"All animals are equal - unless they're Instagram-compatible."

And indeed: contemporary morality in the gastronomic field is slipping like an avocado nigiri from a bamboo leaf. For while eating meat is branded a sin and pork is the kitchen devil, salmon maki is the ultimate in spiritual well-being. As if fish would somehow suffer less. Or at least: would die more aesthetically.

Sausage is no longer a food - class-conscious stigma. Suburban nostalgia, where grandmother still stirred the sausage with blood, and under the grill grill hissed not smoking intentions, but bacon.
In contrast, sushi is not meat - but cultural experience. And if the animal is served raw, bathed in a little soy sauce, it is not a sacrifice - but wellness globe on a plate.

This is postmodern ethical selectivity: the pig stinks from sin, and the tuna beautifully served sublime.

The pig is excessive reminds us. Body, dirty, loud. You can't make a minimalist aesthetic plate out of it. Pork is what the posthuman welfare neurosis has already cannot process.
Because sausage is not only fatty - but also honest. It shows that we are made of meat. But sushi is an elegant illusion: death, but in a designer version.

That's why sausage is embarrassing. Because it has the peasant, the industry, the meat grinder, the violence. But sushi is: transcendental food. Execution, but in tissue paper.

And here comes the new moral paradox: for some reason the fish we do not count animal. Perhaps because it cannot whine, it cannot "protest by crying".
But the fish is still alive. Only quieter. It doesn't blow the fuse. It doesn't scream remorse. It's just there, under the soy sauce, ethically sterilised.

The sentimentalism of modern man is selective: the cry of the pig is guilt-inducing, but the silence of the fish: acquittal.

This is the new order of the food-fascist age:
- if it's animal but exotic, it's cool
- if of animal origin, but conventional, then inferior

The sushi cosmopolitan self-expression, the sausage provincial self-abandonment. One is "gastrotourism", the other "cholesterol suicide".

And meanwhile, the spirituality of "all life is sacred" looks slyly the other way.
The bottom line: be well presented. Because suffering is not bad, just don't be visible.