Christien Meindertsma: PIG 05049 by Christien Meindertsma

I've been after a copy of this book for a while. The idea of tracking all the 'uses' of an animal in the modern industrialised food chain was just too fascinating and macabre to miss out on. The book itself is small and stocky and the plastic pig identifier is a really nice touch. It takes the form of a categorised index of 'use' and is the same format through out - there are a lot of pages.

I can imagine the artist/author's original version with the actual plastic tag and perhaps the actual pig's skin for the cover - that would have been truly disturbing. I was a little disappointed that there were a few printing defects on a couple of the spreads but it's still a great object.