Last week at the LAF, the speaker mentioned an anecdote of a girl who was surprised (and surely shocked) at discovering that the coincidence in name between her chicken sandwich and that of the Gallus domestics (AKA ordinary chicken) wasn't arbitrary. This is not an isolated case; apparently, many urban kids have trouble—or simply fail—to associate the content of supermarket food trays with the actual animals they are a product of*.

This lack of agriculture is certainly part of the price some urbanites have to pay for living far from nature. But of course, there are ways to (try to) compensate for the problem. You can buy nice illustrated books, subscribe to National Geographic or do some travelling. Alternatively, you can go ironic or even cynical and laugh at your own weaknesses; and if you are talented enough, you can even turn this into art.

This is the case of the street artist Banksy, who held a very cool exhibition opened a very cool and peculiar Pet Shop last autumn in Greenwich Village, N.Y.C.  The shop is the product of Bansky's  sarcastic view on the relation that certain children of the asphalt have to animals: "New Yorkers don’t care about art, they care about pets. So I’m exhibiting them instead. I wanted to make art that questioned our relationship with animals and the ethics and sustainability of factory farming, but it ended up as chicken nuggets singing. "... Chicken nuggets and swimming fish fingers,  moving sausages,  and other mechanically animated beasts that you wouldn't want to miss.

The Pet Shop is now closed and, since I happen to live an ocean far from Manhattan, I didn’t have the chance to visit it. Fortunately, we will always have Youtube and the internet. And, although it is not the same, we can still enjoy part of the experience.

I tell you, mine might be a twisted mind, or perhaps living in big cities has severely affected me; but I guess I would be more prone to go to a pet shop like this than to the zoo—which probably proves that I just didn’t get the point. Oh well.