Sausage Party and the God-Hating Hedonism of Animated Food

Last updated on: August 12, 2016 at 11:50 am by Paul Asay

Sausage Party and the God-Hating Hedonism of Animated Food 2016-08-12T11:50:57-06:00 Paul Asay

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The afterlife is not pretty.

It’s a seductive message for the 21st century, a time when traditional religion is losing its sway and personal temperance, especially in the realm of sexuality, is seen by some as anachronistic. Sin just isn’t really a thing anymore. In Christianity, believers are taught to die to themselves—a pretty radical concept when many people believe that living for oneself and ones’ own satisfaction are the highest of goals.

But let’s assume that Frank, Brenda and the rest have successfully freed themselves from the tyranny of the gods. That, for some reason, authorities simply shut the door on this mysterious massive crime scene—leaving the dead shoppers where they lay and not bothering to haul in the food for questioning (or cart it to other stores). Their supermarket is now a food-run utopia.

But just how long a shelf life do these newly freed foodstuffs have? We know that food spoils in this world: We’re often told so. We’ve got to assume the store’s refrigeration will be turned off. How long, exactly, does Frank have to live before he starts stinking to high heaven and grows increasingly gelatinous? How long before Brenda develops a case of mold on her buns? Sure, a few imperishables will survive, to spend an eternity knocking around the market’s dark, empty, smelly aisles, but everything else will eventually die slow, agonizing, putrifying deaths. Not pretty.

The food is rebelling against its own, innate purpose. When they don’t serve that purpose, spoilage happens.

All those carbohydrates, just dust in the wind.

Now, it’s true that from the point of view of the food, their purpose is lame and these Sausage Party gods are jerks. You don’t create intelligent, feeling things just to eat them, do you? Of course not. (In defense of us, it’s pretty obvious we weren’t trying to create sentient food; the source of consciousness in these edible entities is a theological riddle.) If you’re making food, you’re not trying to imbue each one with personality and hopes and dreams. You’re just trying to make something tasty. Even if we food-makers had the technology to create sentient food, it seems like a lot of extra work to give something a soul if you’re only mean to chow down on it later. It’s not like the tears improve the taste.

If we extrapolate the theological lessons from Sausage Party into our own world, we know that 1) We were created, and 2) we have a purpose. But what is our purpose? Surely more than to be a cosmic snack of the Almighty. From what we can see, nature is pretty efficient (in its own rambling way). What we see in creation generally serves a purpose. As such, our minds and souls and ability to comprehend the world around us must’ve been created for a reason, too. Our purpose, logically, must be something different than that of the food in Sausage Party.

But what sort of cosmic purpose could our minds and souls serve? Could it be that we’re being called into a relationship? To commune, in some way, with our Creator? To think about Him? Could it be that, when the Bible says that God loves us and wants us to love Him, could it be telling the truth?

Frank, I’m sure, would call foul. He’d demand proof, and of course proof is hard to come by in the realm of faith. But evidence? There’s plenty of that—far more evidence than the food in Sausage Party had of their own delusional beliefs. Evidence is all around us. We just have to break out of our own packages and look.

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