There’s an idiom: “Like watching sausage getting made.” The idea being that you may like how sausage tastes, but that if you saw how sausage was made, you would find it a lot less appealing. The idiom applies not just to sausages but to the unsavory activities that are the backdrop for what we enjoy or admire, from law to medicine to politics to whatever.
This week, I re-read the celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain’s essay “Don’t Eat Before Reading This,” which brings the sausage metaphor home to its source—food—by detailing the unsavory behind-the-scenes restaurant practices that foist crummy cuisine on a credulous clientele. If I could sum up his piece in a few cartoons, these would be the ones:
If you would like to see more cartoons on the topic, here’s a tasting menu of them in this slide show, compliments of the cartoonists:
