Signs. . .What to say about signs? They are oh so helpful and hurtful. They share information and impose rules and regulations, they can make us laugh and cringe. I find them curious, how they so easily control the populous, they ideally stand/hang and yet are so remarkably powerful.

This sign, hangs on the wall of a diner on your way to the restroom.

I post it here for several reasons:

First being it's a cute and it's funny, it makes for great wall décor for the diner in which it hangs.

Second, when I saw this sign I was with a friend of mine. She became incredibly offended by what it says, she thinks it is completely rude to the pig. Now in all fairness, my friend is vegetarian, doesn't use products tested on animals, volunteers at animal shelters and is very passionate about the treatment of animals. Needless to say this sign made her seriously upset, she wanted to take it down. Even knowing all this about her I still thought how strange. . . why get so upset over some restaurants' wall décor? It's just a sign.

Finally, it made me think back to an excerpt from About Cooking by John Berger. In this excerpt, "Why Look at Animals?," Berger says, "They were with man at the centre of his world. Such centrality was of course economic and productive. Whatever the changes in productive means and social organisation, men depended upon animals for food, work, transport, clothing." I think that this sign, in a nut shell, speaks directly to these notions that Berger is talking about.

Little did this sign know what sort of thought would actually be put into it. What sort of larger notions it was tackling when it was hung on the wall. How perspective changes depending on who is viewing it. And what sort of power it has.