Land of Plenty

Last week was Pilgrim's Bounty in Azeroth, paralleling American Thanksgiving. Azeroth is certainly a world of unlimited and self-replenishing bounty; what better way to celebrate than sit at a feast-laden table and partake of turkey and pie that seem to increase in quantity the more you pass them around. Or, combine ingredients from bottomless Bountiful Barrels that conveniently appear in major locations, to create holiday-themed foods. Since this new holiday is far and away the cheapest and most efficient way to develop cooking skill, I know I'm not the only one who ended up with 360 portions of assorted feast components sitting in my bag waiting to expire untasted. With great bounty comes great waste!

The Azerothian turkey is a special breed of fowl that turns into plucked, cleaned, and (to all appearances) fully cooked turkeys ready for the eating. They already run wild in Northrend's Howling Fjord, where their population defies all attempts at extermination. During Pilgrim's Bounty their range extends to Elwynn Forest and Tirisfal Glades. Their only purpose appears to be hunting quarry, either for the regular 'Friend or Fowl' achievement, or for the Pilgrim's Bounty 'Turkinator' achievement that rewards wanton turkey-slaying. I expect I wasn't the only one who rampaged through those zones tossing moonfires left and right at every frolicking turkey, leaving their perfectly roasted corpses unretrieved in order to save time (and even so, it took me several failed tries and hundreds of slaughtered turkeys to attain my achievement). Perhaps most people don't feel compelled to pity the turkey, widely considered to be one of the dumbest animals on earth. Even more than that, they're just pixels, so it doesn't matter (right?).

As a side-note, early medieval monks also thought self-cooking fowls would be a great invention. In The Land of Cokaygne (a fanciful medieval vision of utopia), flocks of roasted geese fly right into your mouth:

Ȝite I do ȝow mo to witte:
Þe gees irostid on þe spitte
Fleeȝ to þat abbai, God hit wot,
And grediþ: ‘Gees al hote, al hot !’ (ll. 101-4)

Animal studies happens to be my particular research interest these days, so I always keep a keen eye out for critters and beasts in the digital realm. One theme that always crops up is factory farming and the distance it allows us to have from the gory side of eating. There's nothing non-gory about factory farms, of course, but that side of food production goes on far away from where we live, and the chicken that we eat comes to us in tidily plastic-wrapped parcels . (Having grown up on a farm myself, I know all too well the smell of boiled feathers and singed chicken skin, and the sound of a chicken squawk emitted through a severed throat—though my experience is only in a free-range setting.) Sure, we're aware of the terrible conditions of factory farms, but we really don't have to confront it even though we use their products.

The digital world being one that we can completely control, it is in many ways our own utopia—a place where everything happens just as it is coded to. Nature and civilization—and their relationship to each other—are perfected to reflect society's ideals. Turkeys that transform themselves into nicely packaged morsels and who reappear minutes (or seconds) after they've been killed? Perfect!