The fried foot in your freezer

Dateline: Durham, North Carolina. It’s July 2004, and a family has bought a box of Banquet brand frozen fried chicken. When they brought it home and opened it up, they got a shock. Inside was what appeared to be a small human foot, battered and fried just like the chicken pieces all around it. Five little toes looked bite-sized, but their appetite was likely gone by then. They called the police. The police came, and took the foot and put it in a city freezer. The next day they brought it to the Chief Medical Examiner’s Office in Chapel Hill. The X-ray revealed no bone structure. It was merely dough, intricately sculpted for maximum shock value. No crime here. But the investigation wasn’t finished. Conagra knew its reputation was on the line if more customers found deep-fried phony human body parts intermingled with authentic frozen fried chicken. Somehow they discovered the perp at one of its plants in Batesville, Arkansas, and promptly fired that person, along with three others who presumably could or should have been aware of the fried foot caper. Having supervised our coverage of this story when I was a newspaper editor in Durham, I have since wondered what motivated the sculptor. Was it a subtle critique of meat-eaters? A quiet rebellion against the tedium of the assembly line? Or was it a long-suppressed creative urge finally expressing itself with the only medium at hand, a pile of gloppy dough? And then I think of the moment when a supervisor or security summoned the person to a meeting, and a photo, perhaps this one, of the evidence was displayed. Then HR would read the section of the company rules that prohibited employees from making phony human body parts and putting them in with the chicken, and that would be it. I hope this was the moment an artistic career was born.