Saturday, January 20, 2007

Evil or Genius or Evil Genius?

Usually, the descriptors "evil" or "genius" are reserved for extremes and those people or things designated as such by popular culture (or at least your side of the Culture War) are pretty much generally accepted to be true. A few examples:

Hitler = evil
Einstein = genius

Taxes = evil
The PC = genius

But every so often, in the course of our daily travels, we come across something that confounds us because its root seems to potentially be either (or both). I've been wrestling with this question as I flip-flop on the decision about whether to give myself over to a Crack-berry device.

This quickly-approaching superfluous set up is meant only to provide some kind of pseudo-theoretical context for mention of a product which, for me at least, falls squarely in the sights of the gray mushy area that separates clearly evil from clear-cut genius...

It's called SeasonShot and it's a shotgun projectile made up of food seasonings formed into pellets and tightly packed into a shotgun shell casing that is itself a foodstuff. The way it works is that upon impact with say a duck, the shell contents disperse into the duck's body thereby infusing said game with, for example, Teryiaki or lemon pepper. Oh, and killing it too.

The two primary benefits according to the manufacturer are that the seasoning is evenly distributed from within (no "cuts" with only surface flavoring) and that there's no buck shot left in the kill (so no messy cleaning). For ethical (I think) reasons, I'm not providing a link to the site in this post...you can Google it on your own.

Now to the philosophical wranglings (prepare fore some circular logic!)...

I'm not a hunter but I'm a carnivore. I don't ever want to hunt because the thought of killing an animal sickens me but I'm a realist - I know that the meat I buy at the grocery wrapped in cellophane was once breathing. I'm a bit of a foodie and love flavorful food in all its forms but I read the health news so I know that poultry skin is way high in cholesterol.

So where does that leave me on the issue of SeasonShot? Evil or genius? I have this strange appreciation for the ingenuity of the product and since I'm not a vegetarian, I guess I'm pro-killing of animals for food...so I can't condemn one of the means to the tasty end. SO I guess that that leaves me only one choice and that's to regard this product as "evil genius."

1 comment:

Gregory Ng said...

The fact that it kills and seasons is probably the coolest thing I have ever heard of.

IMHO, there's nothing evil about it. I will chalk this up to pure genius.