Tesco

Dear tescows,

I am a passionate man with a great deal of time on his hands and a predisposition towards righteous indignation. As a result of this unique and wonderful combination of elements i have taken it upon myself to begin a new campaign against a great offence within the supermarket community and i would hope that the great and good of tescows will recognise the importance of this campaign and get behind it with spunky gusto!
I am of course speaking of the phallogocentric mis-appropriation and blatant gender bias prevelant in the categorisation of meat products. I realise your fine organisation will of course be fully aware of the controversy surrounding these semantic issues however for the purposes of absolute clarity i feel i ought to spell it out. I am also intending to forward this email on to the morons at the asda and those wooly-headed half-wits wouldn't know a deconstructivist approach to phallogocentric meat product gender-bias if it came and shitted on their lurid green-uniformed faces.

Let's begin with chickens. The inherent sexism within butchery in 2013 is nowhere more apparant than in the blatant male-centric categorisation and sexual objectification of that most glorious of poultry, the chicken.
Chickens: the providers of life in their unselfish production of 'eggs'; the embodiment of 'the feminine' with their strong tone and versatility of real-world knowledge application - shockingly objectified by reductionist sexualised terms for their nutritious femi-flesh such as 'thigh', 'neck' and 'leg', and the absolute worst in this pantheon of hyper-sexualised filth: 'breasts'. In applying such reductionist logic to the nomenclature of fleshy hen products the meat industry creates a metanarrative driven by a phallogocentric bias which deconstructs the complexity of the poultry-feminine to a base level of objectified and sexualised bodily organs. Namely, 'tits'. (And lets face it, who the fuck wants to eat 'chicken tits' anyway?)
In order to address this imbalance i propose the first stage of my grand campaign: in short, the re-appropriation of the semantics of chicken-meat identification to encompass and reflect the intertextual complexities of womanhood while redirecting the male-centric bias towards a less femi-focused, more genderqueer terminology. My solution to this quandry is to rename and thus under-sexualise and mirror the pangender nature of the flesh in question. To this end I suggest we simply call it 'chicken'. "Are you a leg or a breast man?!"..."I am neither. I am a CHICKEN man! (sorry, person! I am a CHICKEN PERSON)".

At the other end of this spectrum of male-centric muck is the graceful and majestic pig. Rather predictably the phallogocentric bias is in this case inverted, the pig being identified as overtly masculine as reflected in the pseudo-aggressive hyper-sexualised terminology of the 'cuts'. The 'shoulder' (strong, powerful and muscular), 'knuckle/shank' (violent, aggressive and 'boney'), and most repugnant of all: the 'loin'. If there was ever a cut of meat which embodies the rape-centric eroticism perpetrated by the male led butchery movement it is the vile 'loin'. The aggressive, thrusting, hard 'loin' - penetrating the mouths of the innocent, subverting the consensuality of the sexually-charged act of eating, further promoting the meta-agenda of the butcher pseudo-rapists. In continuing to persist with these blatantly sexist terms you imbue a filth-narrative at the very heart of the pork experience: the 'shoulder' giving power to the restraint of the femi-victim; the 'knuckle' enforcing and promoting the fear of the abused; and the 'loin' violating and sullying the cleanliness and delicate femininity of the recipient. Talk about a male-chauvanist pig. To remedy this i propose a renaming of all pork products, reducing the inherent sexuality by simply calling it 'pig'. (You can keep bacon though. Bacon is just bacon. Bacon bacon bacon bacon. Bacon).

One further point of general meat-naming wrongness: 'mince'. Blatantly homophobic, the 'mince' meat is presented as 'less than meat', a cruel reduction of substance and texture, reflective of the hyper-aggressivity of phallogocentric homophobic male butchery bias, and presented as less masculine than the firm solidity of a shoulder, a leg or a bollock.

I trust you will take these recommendations on board and apply a new gender-neutral approach to the categorisation of meats, allowing a more femi-positive message to permeate the narratives of our shopping lives.

Many thanks for your time,
Niesche x

Reply

Dear Niesche
My name is Giorgia, I am the Customer Service Manager responsible for responding to your email.

Thank you for contacting us.

Please let me assure you that it was never our intention to cause any offence to the public concerning the labelling of our meat products.

I have forwarded your comments to our Business Support Team who will be sure to inform the appropriate departments.

Once again, I would like to offer my sincere apologies for any offence caused and if I can be of further assistance in future, please do not hesitate to contact me.

Kind regards

Giorgia Warsama
Tesco Customer Service