Scarefish

Sometimes you hear people complain that nowadays food doesn't look anything like what it was made from. Examples that are customarily given consist of French fries, hamburgers, and so on. Although I do agree that a ground beef patty that looks nothing like a steak, even less a cow, can be considered, at least by some, edible, I am compelled to argue that if bread resembles flour, wheat grain or the actual plant, something wrong gone down during the making process. This is especially true for animal-based food. Even before I became vegetarian, carbonised carcasses of chickens roasted entirely never looked very appetizing to me. There are warrior-like gourmands, who like to stare their dish in the eye while they are consuming it. The picture below, that I found on the kitchen counter today, confirms it. 

Unfortunatly, I spent the night before playing Silent Hill, and the gruesome image of a disembowelled caged fish, with its white eye, mouth full of teeth and vegetables sticking out of its gut had distinctly ungastronomic effect on me. The dark wood background also matched the color of rust-covered walls of the "hell" levels of the said game. Also, once I noticed that the cage is not merely fish-shaped, but has a decorative fin and eye, I couldn't help but wonder, where do such peculiarly made objects come from. A giant, with a grim smile wielding a hammer over the furnance and a gloomy cold hall with blue-grey walls filled with cages of all sizes and shapes turned up in front of my mind's eye. Even if I slept fine the night before, today I will probably be dreaming about being squished between the two layers of bars, on which someone's dark humor produced the images of hands and added metal rings in front of the face; a fish with sharp claws from Murakami's Hard-boiled Wonderland will be creeping up, with quite clear intentions...