A new category for periodic posts has surfaced recently that offers real potential alongside our Fortune Cookie Files and Food Service Typos. This category is Food Kitsch.
Kitsch is a classic German/Yiddish word that typically refers to art that is “excessively garish or sentimental… usually considered in bad taste” according to WordNet. Other definitions toss in adjectives like vulgar, trite, melodramatic, lowbrow, and tasteless. Some of what is clearly kitsch is simply offensive, but there are also examples of kitsch that are curious, over-the-top, and even wonderful in an odd or disturbed way.
Kitsch shows up everywhere, but one place with a particular affinity for kitsch is the kitchen. We consider this a true delight, and from time to time we’d love to pass along a few examples.
Today, that is a product about to hit the market called Season Shot.
What is it? It is food-grade ammunition for your shotgun.
I can’t say it better than the Season Shot website itself: “Season Shot is made of tightly packed seasoning bound by a fully biodegradable food product. The seasoning is actually injected into the bird on impact seasoning the meat from the inside out. When the bird is cooked the seasoning pellets melt into the meat spreading the flavor to the entire bird. Forget worrying about shot breaking your teeth and start wondering about which flavor shot to use!”
One of their slogans is: SHOOTS, KILLS, SEASONS.
Season Shot also celebrates the fact that their shot brings down your bird without any damage to the environment, and will be available in five delicious flavors: Cajun, Lemon Pepper, Garlic, Teriyaki, and Honey Mustard.
The target market? (chuckle) Men equally happy with large fire arms and oven mitts.
FOOD KITSCH METER: 7.5
excessively garish or sentimental art; usually considered in bad taste
1. Sentimentality or vulgar, often pretentious bad taste, especially in the arts: “When money tries to buy beauty it tends to purchase a kind of courteous kitsch” (William H. Gass).
2. An example or examples of kitsch.
adj.
Of, being, or characterized by kitsch: “The kitsch kitchen … has aqua-and-white gingham curtains and rubber duck-yellow walls painted in a fried-egg motif” (Suzanne Cassidy).
Kitsch (/kɪtʃ/) is the German and Yiddish word denoting art that is considered an inferior, tasteless copy of an extant style of art. kKtsch was a response to the 19th century art whose aesthetics convey exaggerated sentimentality and melodrama, hence, kitsch art is closely associated with sentimental art. Kitsch also refers to the types of art that are like-wise æsthetically deficient (whether or not it is sentimental, glamorous, theatrical, or creative), making it a creative gesture that merely imitates the superficial appearances of art through repeated conventions and formulae. Contemporaneously, kitsch also (loosely) denotes art that is aesthetically pretentious to the degree of being in poor taste and industrially-produced art-items that are considered trite and crass.
1 : something that appeals to popular or lowbrow taste and is often of poor quality
