Ladies and gentlemen, the dancing pork chop

The worlds of food and animatronics (motorized puppets) collide more than you might expect.

Stew Leonard’s, a prominent grocery store chain in Connecticut, features the “Farm Fresh Five,” a band of milk cartons with faces that serenade you as you pick out their lifeless breathren in the dairy section. 

And so when a video of Irish artist Joan Healy’s “Meat Market” installation surfaced on Makezine, I thought: It’s about time grilling season got a mascot — the sound-activated dancing pork chop. As the chop (which looks like a fleshy baseball glove) jerks back and forth to a whistling sound, it’s a reminder of the way mechanized food has been used to say (or sell) a lot of things.