So, dear readers, what’s for dinner tonight? Maybe a little chicken? Maybe a nice juicy steak with all the trimmings? Or how about a tasty leg of lamb? Or what do you say to a good ole slab of bacon? Hmmm, sounds delicious, doesn’t it? But wait, why stop there? What about a well-grilled slice of dog? Or maybe some barbecued cat? Or, what about something a bit closer to home?

If you’re willing to chow down on a juicy beef burger then why not a cat burger? Cows have as much personality as cats or dogs and quite a few humans too. Our bovine pals have their likes and dislikes, their mood swings, their affections, they can even fall in love, get stressed, and like to share a private cow joke or two. So what’s the big problem with eating meat if we’re not going to put felines, canines, chimps, and even humans on the menu too?

Oh, don’t tell me you’re suddenly squeamish about a lickle-bitty kitty? Hell, when most of you go into that supermarket you positively drool over all those tasty meaty morsels bagged, sealed, and wrapped like kinky Christmas presents on display. Let’s be honest, we rarely ever think about what the fuck we’re actually looking at before popping it in our basket. I know I don’t. I just laden up the old trolley and head back home to an artery-clogging meat-filled breakfast, lunch, dinner time, and tea. That’s right, just wipe that cow’s ass and pass me mah knife and fork.

Of course, if that’s your take on eating meat products, then you won’t be at all put off by Brazilian artist Fábio Magalhães‘s hyperrealistic paintings of human body parts diced, chopped, and gutted like some poor cow or pig or sheep and neatly bagged up for our consumption. Magalhães’s paintings are simultaneously extraordinary works of painterly beauty and gruesome depictions of bloody horror. His intention is in part to make the viewer think about the meat industry, about eating meat, and what it is we’re actually consuming.

Magalhães started his “intimate” meat portraits with the series O Grande Corpo (The Great Body) in 2008, in which he worked from photographs of his face and body tightly wrapped in polythene. The paintings present a complex visceral image of gruesome horror together with, in some images, an association of auto-eroticism. Magalhães next produced a more bloody series of Retratos Íntimos (Intimate Portraits) which show in incredible detail images of innards, body parts, and blood products all wrapped in polythene. The high quality of his painting technique together with the subject matter make it almost “impossible [for the viewer] not to react with the heart.”

By exposing the viewer to images of brutalized body parts, Magalhães is also asking the viewer to question what it means to be human. He has divested the human body from its imposed religious, psychological, historical, and personal significance to question what makes our existence different from any other animal if all we are is the same flesh and bone?

Magalhães grew up in Bahia in north-eastern Brazil. He took an ealy interest in painting and drawing and spent hours looking at and copying paintings by artists as diverse as Picasso, Caravaggio, and Jackson Pollock from the pages of his father’s encyclopedia. He went on to study at the Fine Arts School of the Federal University of Bahia. Since then, he has been exhibiting his work since 2003, with his paintings shown in group and solo shows across most of South America. You can see more of Fábio Magalhães’s work here.
 

 

 
See more of Fábio Magalhães’s bloody brilliant paintings, after the jump…
 

Jerry Garcia and Phil Lesh enjoying some health food, 1966
 
You’re more likely to associate vegetarian fare like falafel, hummus and ganja goo balls with the Grateful Dead and their parking-lot partisans than bloody steaks, and for good reason. The cookbook Cooking with the Dead collects “over 65 fabulous kynd [sic] and caring vegetarian recipes prepared with love” that Deadheads came up with to feed themselves and make money on the road. They took that “are you kind?” thing to heart.

But Owsley “Bear” Stanley, the Dead’s visionary soundman and the West Coast’s industrious LSD manufacturer, had some peculiar ideas about nutrition that might not have been welcome in the latter-day Deadheads’ tailgate scene. When the Dead moved down to Los Angeles for a few months in 1966, Owsley found a cheap house for rent in Watts—probably not a hard trick so soon after the riots—where the Dead and their retinue observed Owsley’s zero-carb, zero-fiber diet. From Rolling Stone:

In February 1966, Owsley and the Dead moved to Los Angeles for another series of Acid Tests. Owsley rented a pink stucco house in Watts, next door to a brothel, where they all lived together. For the Dead, the good news was that they now had nothing to do all day but jam. The bad news was that since Owsley was paying the rent, he expected them to adhere to his unconventional ideas and beliefs. He was convinced that human beings were natural carnivores, not meant to eat vegetables or fiber. “Roughage is the worst thing you can put through your body,” he says. “Letting vegetable matter go through a carnivorous intestine scratches it up and scars it and causes mucus that interferes with nutrition.”

For the next six weeks, the Grateful Dead and their girlfriends ate meat and milk for breakfast, lunch and dinner. “I’ll never forget that when you’d open the refrigerator, there were big slabs of beef in there,” Rosie McGee, Phil Lesh’s girlfriend at the time, later told Garcia biographer Jackson. “The shelves weren’t even in there — just these big hunks of meat. So of course behind his back, people were sneaking candy bars in. There were no greens or anything — he called it ‘rabbit food.’”

 
More on the idiosyncratic carnivorous diet of the young Grateful Dead after the jump…

 
If you’ve been thinking of giving up meat for the new year, read on. This article from The New York Times, cuts right to the chase and might push your decision over the edge… for good. The bit about McDonald’s, Burger King and grocery chains using Beef Products in their ground beef is utterly revolting, as bad as anything we learned from Fast Food Nation:

Eight years ago, federal officials were struggling to remove potentially deadly E. coli from hamburgers when an entrepreneurial company from South Dakota came up with a novel idea: injecting beef with ammonia.

The company, Beef Products Inc., had been looking to expand into the hamburger business with a product made from beef that included fatty trimmings the industry once relegated to pet food and cooking oil. The trimmings were particularly susceptible to contamination, but a study commissioned by the company showed that the ammonia process would kill E. coli as well as salmonella.

Officials at the United States Department of Agriculture endorsed the company?