ABSTRACT
To animal lovers and vegetarians, the recipe would speak for itself, highlighting the intolerable suffering of living creatures rendered as mere meat for the table: recent work by post-humanist scholars such as Simon Estok and Erica Fudge has discussed early modern resistance to, and rare embrace of, vegetarianism based on the dehumanizing influence of meat-eating exemplified by extreme cases of torture like Wecker's recipe. From the fourteenth to the seventeenth century, food functioned much as it had always done, as propaganda and display, but with increasing attention to its potential as art, sculpture and even full-bore theatre. Wecker's goose is not meat until after its body is cut into by the diner, extending the 'making' process from kitchen to table. Cross-dressed meats masquerade as living creatures, as themselves in lively form, until they are dismembered a second time by the diner who restores the certainty of death and renewed life as human, not animal, flesh.
