Driving down the highway, I passed a billboard featuring a cheerful image: a quaint Chapel Hill bakery, two lovely sweet rolls perched invitingly in the foreground. But a closer look revealed that the sign was advertising something else entirely—the “Favorite Sausage Restaurant of the Southwest.”
The sausages are drawn to look sweet rolls. A few minutes later, I passed the restaurant itself, decorated as a family boutique rather than a brutalist meat factory.
In other words, beneath the plain exterior, lay a complicated chain of slaughterhouses and commercial interests, all profiting from the bodies of animals.
Like so much in our economy, the product is separated completely from the process.
It’s not a pig-slaughtering plant—it’s a “sausage boutique.” This tactic—this camouflage, this conspiracy, whatever you want to call it—is what drives many young people to despair. They sense the dissonance. They know the story behind the product, and they know it is not the story being sold.
Advertising isn’t required to disclose the process or the impact; but only to sell the dream.
Think about what this really means: hiding the process and its consequences from the consumer invites them to become insane with doubt and mistrust.
The visual arts have grappled with this insanity throughout thr twentieth century, in which much of the work was about reconnecting product and process. Artists insisted that a work was meaningless without exposing the processes—and the reality—that created it. This is why exposed ceiling beams became the hallmark of “hipster” architecture, and then, later, middle-class design. Unwittingly, they absorbed the lessons of modern artists who understood that horror emerges when process and product are severed.
The grotesque scenes of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle are not so different from minimalist art: both are critiques of a system that hides its violence. Minimalism wasn’t about reducing the product to its simplest form; it was about merging product and process so that the making itself became the art. It was an exploration of a deeper realization: that the ends do not justify the means.
The means, in fact, are the ends—or at least, they have become so after centuries of pretending otherwise. We live now in a time when we must examine the ethics of our means.
Just look at the gas you pump into your car and its relation to climate change. The final product—fuel, electricity—is divorced from the devastation required to produce it.
how you do one thing is how you do everything, gors the old wisdom teaching. Explore your relationship with means and ends. Notice that the way the electricity is made is just as important as fueling your car.
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