Bruni on Pig Butts

...[T]oday, hysteria stands predominantly under the sign of vulnerability, of a threat to our bodily and/or psychic identity. We have only to recall the all-pervasiveness of the logic of victimization, from sexual harassment to the dangers of food and tobacco, so that the subject itself is increasingly reduced to 'that which can be hurt'.--Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies

Frank Bruni recently visited Momofuku Ssam Bar, Daisy May's BBQ U.S.A., Fatty Crab, Otto, Prune, Resto, The Spotted Pig, Suba, and Trestle on Tenth, and had multiple holy experiences, multiple carnivorous, culinary orgasms. He poetically rhapsodizes upon his blissful ecstasy of gluttonous nirvana in "Fat, Glorious Fat, Moves to the Center of the Plate".

For your reading enjoyment I offer a platter of succulent quotes that verge into the little-known genre of carnivore porn:

It was an ugly scene, and it was a beautiful one. We lunged at the flesh. Tore at it. Yanked it toward ourselves in dripping, jagged hunks, sometimes ignoring the lettuce wraps on the side so we could stuff it straight into our mouths. We looked, I realized, like hyenas at an all-you-can-eat buffet on the veldt, and I wasn’t surprised to notice other diners staring at us.
[...]
It’s as if decades of proliferating sushi and shrinking plates, of clean California cuisine and exhortations to graze, have fostered a robust (or is that rotund?) counterculture of chefs and diners eager to cut against the nutritional grain and straight into the bellies of beasts. In fact, bellies (most often pork, more recently lamb) are this counterculture’s LSD.
[...]
The “crispy pork” with pickled watermelon in a dish that Fatty Crab mockingly labels a salad amounts to cubes of fried pork belly, and the rest of the menu (pork ribs, small burgers doused with mayonnaise and aptly named fatty sliders) works a similarly clogged vein. During a recent lunch there with a dauntless friend, I was touched by the way our server — let’s call him Sisyphus — replenished the moist towelettes at our table over and over again. What we really needed him to do was put a dropcloth under us and, at meal’s end, hose us down.
[...]
It’s some ritual [at Daisy May’s BBQ U.S.A.]. Before the platter of pig appeared before the group I’d assembled, a server set up two perpendicular wood braces to support it. They formed a cross, a reminder — as if we would need one — that something died for the deadly sin dearest to us.
That something was pretty much intact: snout pointed straight toward me, two little ears, four little hooves and a profoundly bronzed hide. The server carved into that skin and peeled away flaps of it, exposing a lustrous layer of fat and a deep reservoir of meat. The rest was up to us, a few sets of plastic tongs and some dull plastic knives.
“This really puts you in touch with your barbaric self,” said a woman in our group as she tugged at individual ribs along the pig’s midsection. Her fingers were slick with grease.
A man in the group flashed back to his two previous dinners. “I had suckling pig in Boston on Saturday,” he said. “I had a pork chop at ’Inoteca last night.”
He paused for a beat, then added: “It’s a lifestyle choice.”
So it is, and there’s a wicked, wonderful cluster of restaurants to support it.

Yummy! A delectably dangerous, artery-clogging, heart-attack inducing, carnivore's delight!