Your Headline of the Day

Yes, I too enjoy eating seafood, but:

Is that Calamari You’re Eating…or Sliced Pig Rectum?

Wait. What?

But yes, hot on the hooves of the UK horse meat burger “scandal”, Americans aren’t always eating what they think they’re eating when they order calamari – allegedly, anyway.

The terms you’ll need to learn for this one include: “imitation calamari”, which is exactly what it says – something which is not calamari, but which is pretending to be calamari – and “pork chitterlings”, the posh name for pigs’ intestines. I love how they’ve dressed that latter one up to sound cute, when actually it’s pig gut. Still, it’s better than its other name:

Though it has a shape and texture similar to the real thing, its component parts are decidedly different. While calamari comes from squid, the replica is supposedly made of hog rectum, otherwise known as “bung.”

Shudder.

Mark Wheeler, a spokesman for the USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) – the department tasked with ensuring the correct labeling and packaging of our nation’s meat products – told The Huffington Post he wasn’t aware of any products specifically labeled as “imitation calamari.” If it does exist, and is derived from a hog’s rectum, he said it would have to be clearly identified as such.

Which is why when you eat calamari, you should always go for tubes and tentacles, because they are the bits of squid that don’t resemble any part of a pig’s alimentary canal.

As far as I’m aware, anyway.

3 thoughts on “Your Headline of the Day

  1. “…go for tubes and tentacles, because they are the bits of squid that don’t resemble any part of a pig’s alimentary canal.”

    Not unless there is something very horribly wrong with the pig.

  2. Tara > You’ve just made me realise that eating pig’s rectum is actually far preferably to eating diseased pig’s rectum.

    “Thanks”

  3. Good god. Between the worms crawling out of spiders, hand sanitizer only protecting against SOME germs, and now this. Dead.

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