What’s The Deal With La Belle et la Boeuf’s Freaky Billboards?

Burger chain La Belle et ea Boeuf (or The Beauty and the Beeeef) has been rapidly expanding across Quebec (and is also making a move to Florida), and has taken out a few billboards around town to help drive customers its way.

Those billboards are, uh, creative, to say the least, although their meaning seems to be veiled by a very thick layer of weirdness. Fuck No Montreal, the meticulous chronicler of all things tacky in Montreal, snapped the following borderline-creepy advertisement for the Quebec-based series of burger restaurants.

There’s a lot to unpack here — is it cannibalism if a pegasus-like half-person, half-burger chows down on an actual human? Where is the burger’s mouth? And why is there an anarchist symbol (the encircled red “A” on the left) here?

That’s not the only one around town.

Eater Montreal

In English, that ad reads “Save a chicken, eat a burger”. Mysteries continue to abound here: is La Belle et la Boeuf secretly an animal rights front, or affiliated with PETA? What is the intrinsic value in saving a chicken but killing a cow? Is it basic economics because one dead cow yields many more meals than one dead chicken? Or is their meat secretly lab-grown, requiring no slaughtering? How did this chicken get a tattoo on top of its feathers?

Oh, and why is there another anarchist symbol here? Encyclopedia Brittanica describes anarchism thusly:

A principle or theory of life and conduct under which society is conceived without government — harmony in such a society being obtained, not by submission to law, or by obedience to any authority, but by free agreements concluded between the various groups, territorial and professional, freely constituted for the sake of production and consumption.

The links between anarchism and a chain of eight burger restaurants are not immediately apparent: presumably the company is not truly anarchist, and its “government” is its management, but maybe La Belle et la Boeuf is secretly a radical front, out to destroy the institutions of the state and capitalism that bind us. Or maybe they just make burgers.

Readers, if you have any thoughtful analyses about what these highly-proficient Photoshop composites mean, and how they function to sell burgers on a psychological level, please send them our way and we’ll share them.

• Fuck No Montreal [Instagram]
• Fuck No Montreal [Tumblr]
• Anarchism [The Anarchist Library]