Further Evidence of the Decline of Western Civilization - Carnivore Carnival

As if we needed more evidence.

The Kitchener Cordless Super Jerky Blaster is on sale for $29.00. That’s 71% off.

And what, you may ask, is a jerky blaster? The Q&A section of the listing has the answer:

“The jerky blaster is for making meat sticks without a casing, and flat meat (jerky) You add your seasoned meat mixture into the meat barrel, then squeeze the mixture through a tube (flat or round style) onto a baking sheet.”

The device in question looks like the offspring of a cordless drill and a caulking gun. A simple pull of the trigger and you can produce oozing meat mixture in flat or round. The very existence of this tool raises questions.

Ok, so you want to make your own special recipe venison Slim Jims. I get that. You’re making a bunch, and your arms get tired rolling the stuff out by hand.

But cordless? You’re going to be preparing beef jerky on the roof? In the woods?  On the back of a moving flatbed truck? There are electric sausage stuffers on the market. They sit on your kitchen counter and plug into the wall socket. In your kitchen, where you prepare food. The existence of a cordless jerky blaster infers the existence of a place with no electricity, but access to cookie sheets and an oven. And yet, and yet, the jerky blaster comes with only one battery, so after some limited period of meat extrusion one must find a working outlet to recharge the device.

Someone in product development somewhere thought this was a great idea, and it passed muster in the executive offices. What America needs is a hyper-specialized cordless meat processing device. Nobody stopped for a moment and said “This is idiocy. Nobody needs to make jerky more than fifteen feet from an outlet.” I guess it’s a new rule for the age of lithium ion batteries: If it can be made it can be made electric, and if it can be made electric, it can (and will) be made cordless, whether that makes the remotest sense or not. For that matter, does any private individual in this world make enough jerky to need a dedicated tool like this? (“Hey Frank, check it out. Fresh batch of jer- Hey Frank, come back here!”)

I am imagining some factory worker in China asking the purpose of this new product. The look on this person’s face on receiving the answer would be priceless. And we used to call them inscrutable. We, who have created the most completely unnecessary thing.

On another front, the 666 food wagon, located in Manhattan, has come out with the world’s most luxurious hamburger. Costing $666, it contains a patty of Kobe beef wrapped in gold leaf, lobster, foie gras, truffles, and caviar. It is wrapped in three one-hundred dollar bills. They call it the “Douche Burger.” Disgusted with expensive and pretentious gourmet burgers presented at trendy restaurants, they came out with their own capper, describing it as “a f—ing burger filled and topped with rich people shit... It may not taste good, but it will make you feel rich as f–k. Douche."

As it turns out, it was a joke and an advertising gimmick. What the article I read reveals, however, is that there are unintentionally shame-filled burgers out there. There is a $295 burger available at a New York restaurant called Serendipity that contains a "mix of Japanese Wagyu beef infused with 10-herb white truffle butter, seasoned with Salish Alderwood smoked Pacific sea salt, topped with cheddar cheese." A similar Wagyu based atrocity with foie gras and champagne retails for the speechless-rendering price of $5,000 at a restaurant called Fleur.

It’s hard enough comprehending people paying the price of a used car for some semi-durable bauble such as a designer handbag. But a burger?

Final kicker, double barreled: Wagyu beef, and its partner on fancy menus, Kobe beef, sound as if they are raised on some meticulously run farm in a picturesque part of Japan. The meat is from some heritage breed of Japanese cattle bred over centuries for the refined palates of the shoguns and pampered by their anal-retentive attendants, right?

First barrel - You cannot purchase actual Japanese Kobe beef in the U.S. As Larry Olmstead reports in Forbes, it is illegal to import it. Second barrel – Wagyu means beef from cows raised in Japan in general, but you can’t get that over here either. What you are eating when you peel off those Benjamins for a Kobe/Wagyu steak (or burger) is U.S.  raised cattle that have a Japanese cow somewhere back in their family tree. It is simple culinary fraud. Boom, boom.

You’d be better off eating an honest stick of American made beef jerky. You could make it yourself.