Thefts! Celebs! Confessions! Free food! C'mon, folks, let's not be so damn predictable in our reading material! Frankly, this week, I'm taking small pleasure in the fact that none of top items contained a question as a headline. Y&H has a bad habit of overusing the question-as-headline gimmick. Oh, the shame...

1. Credit Card Theft a Common Occurence in Restaurants
2. U.S. News' Bedard Lists the Top 10 Restaurants to Spot Celebs
3. Best of D.C.: A Confession About Best New Restaurant
4. Joking Aside, Free Sandwiches Tomorrow at Pollo Campero
5. Eric Ziebold Responds to Y&H's Pot Shot at South by Southwest

Y&H will happily play the corporate shill when it comes to free food. Hey, with this economy, I'd be remiss if I didn't tell you about an opportunity to dine for nothing.

The latest to throw sweet (spicy, actually) nothings at us is Pollo Campero, the Latin American chicken chain with the mascot who's only too happy to have you gnaw on his leg. As part of its national roll-out for a new sandwich line,  Pollo Campero will be giving away sammies all day tomorrow, April 2. You can get either a grilled chicken sandwich (the grill products are relatively new additions, too, a smart concession to American Fattyism) or one loaded down with the original Fried Death Bird.

One sandwich per person. You can find the list of participating D.C. area outlets after the jump.

Pollo Campero Langley Park
1355 E. University Blvd.
Adelphi, MD 20783

Pollo Campero Wheaton
11420 Georgia Ave.
Wheaton, MD 20902

Pollo Campero Gaithersburg
Located in Lake Forest Mall
701 Russell Ave.
Gaithersburg, MD 20877

Pollo Campero Bailey’s
5852 Columbia Pike
Falls Church, VA 22041-2000

Pollo Campero Herndon
496 Elden St.
Herndon, VA 20170-4513

Pollo Campero Massaponax/Spotsylvania
9625 Jefferson Davis Highway
Fredericksburg, VA 22407

Pollo Campero Columbia Heights
3229 14th St. NW
Washington, D.C. 20010

Photo courtesy of Pollo Campero

For several years now, the wife and I have had a running joke about the Pollo Campero mascot, this extremely giddy chicken who, with wings wide apart in welcome, appears to beseech us to enter his restaurant and eat all his little friends. We amuse ourselves, we really do.

But now, in the latest issue of Gastronomica, writer Mark Morton serves up a brilliant essay on the very subject. Here's the nut graf of the piece (which is regrettably not online):

This notion that the natural world is not antagonistic to humans—"nature, red in tooth and claw," as Tennyson put it three centuries later—but rather that it willingly bends itself to comply with human desire, is a version of what literary critics call the pathetic fallacy. Sometimes dismissed as jejune, the pathetic fallacy can, at its best, offer us a vision of a world where humans and their environment coexist in harmony. But at its worst, the pathetic fallacy can become a grotesque fantasy of self-indulgence. In the culinary world, that began to happen about a century ago in print advertisements that depicted animals perversely and gleefully seeking their own slaughter—all in a bid to satisfy human consumption.

Morton's article singles out a number of companies/advisory boards that have used animal characters to peddle their products: The Laughing Cow, Charlie the Tuna, and the California Raisins, among others. These cartoonish creations all encourage us to eat them or the products they make, a fact that, when you think about it, has sort of Jeffrey Dahmer overtones to it, particularly if you buy into this idea that food is the new sex.

If you haven't seen it already, there's also a Web site dedicated to the subject, Suicide Food, which posts pictures of lesser-known animal mascots who desperately want us to nibble on their flesh. The examples are so abundant, throughout so many difficult cultures, that I do have to think that, on some level, humans must feel guilty about eating animal flesh.

Image by Flickr user Daquella manera