It is a revolting sight at any time of the day. But in the morning, right after breakfast and when the body is still without a firm grip on itself, you have to turn your eyes away from it to avoid a violent retch.
Am I the only one to feel like this every time I drive past a government billboard urging me to eat local rather than imported poultry? Unless you have been hibernating over the last few weeks, you must have clapped eyes on one of them: a gigantic, in-your-face close-up of a dead plucked chicken against a clinical white and green background. The message: something or other about local chicken being fresh. Presumably, the suggestion is that this particular chicken's imported dead cousins are not.
The effect of these billboards on anyone who knows the difference between chicken kiev and chicken tandoori is diametrically opposed to its intention. These billboards turn you off sinking your teeth into local, foreign or any other chicken that might be strutting about in the universe for that matter.
The sight of a dead, plucked, headless and uncooked chicken is deeply unappetising. Even a cooked, garnished but carved bird has something not quite right about the way it looks. The absence of a head and the two legs absurdly and melancholically sticking upwards give it a tragicomic aura.
At the same time, there is something oddly pornographic about the sight of a whole uncooked chicken in full view. For some inexplicable reason it is suggestive of human nakedness. When it sits there on the kitchen table – raw, wet and pasty – you get the urge to put a veil on it.
Incidentally, Malta being Europe's think tank of bad taste, a local poultry producer has picked up on this vibe and decided that his business ought to ride on it. His advert portrays a chicken, which is made to look like a sexy young woman, with legs apart, and a come-and-get-me smile on her face.
The advert's slogan is “Eat Me”. Not much imagination is required to figure out the nauseating play on words. I am not being prudish, just queasy about an eroticised chicken. What is truly mind-boggling is how this local king of the poultry business thinks that by turning a chicken into a slut will help him shift more chickens from his slaughterhouse to Maltese dinner tables.
This advert should be entered into the Guinness Book of Records as the lowest level of crassness ever reached in the history of advertising.
But back to the buy-local-chicken billboards. Closer inspection of these Hollywood blockbuster movie-style billboards supplies more specific reasons why they upset your stomach, especially when viewed right after breakfast. The chicken's disembowelled cavity in the middle, the slimy, fatty and goose-bumped skin are enough to turn you into a vegetarian. Add to this the thought of glistening raw chicken legs with pale-coloured fat globules embedded between the muscle layers and you have the makings of the best argument for liberating the chicken kingdom from the holocaust of human consumption.
One of the funniest bits in the film Finding Nemo is the self-help therapy session between a group of sharks trying to convince themselves that “fish are friends, not food”. These uncooked dead chicken billboards can hardly be described as funny. But they achieve the same result: they are the best advertisement for treating this fine-feathered non-flying bird as a friend of humanity instead of a food group. Indeed, if you remove the slogan encouraging you to buy local poultry, these billboards could be part of an animal rights campaign to stop cruelty to animals.
As if this was not bad enough, the billboard does something else to make chicken even less appetising. In big, bold and clinically written script, the billboard designers inscribed what looks like a car serial number right on the dead chicken's glutinous skin. Apparently, this is a certification of quality. A wet, pasty, plucked and headless chicken with a serial number on it. Now doesn’t that make you rush off to buy all the local poultry you can lay your hands on?
Who came up with this textbook case of abysmally bad advertising? Who is the genius who put this piece of instant nausea on Malta's highways and byways? And who was the bright spark in government who thought that this billboard would convince consumer palates to become patriotic in the chicken department?
Incidentally, can we know how much taxpayers have paid to be given a stomach upset every morning, in addition to being stuck in a traffic jam? Those responsible for this mess should be dead meat.
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