Category Archives: Cuisine

For Those of you Who Love Halal and Kosher Calamari…………

         


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“A friend told me the other day that she’d heard a horrifying report on public radio: You know those deep-fried, chewy rings of calamari? Sure. Well, they’re sometimes served in imitation form, made from slices of a pig’s rectum. Wait … what?! And so it happened second-hand, as these things almost always do: An urban legend hatched and spread its wings……… There were no eyewitnesses at all, in fact, and all the other evidence was circumstantial: A recent activist report found signs of modest seafood fraud—one kind of fish mislabeled as another—and a taste test showed that switching rectums for calamari might indeed go undetected. Calhoun did not try to hide the weakness of his case: “Just to repeat one last time,” he said at the close of his radio script, “I have no proof that anyone, anywhere, has ever tried to pass off pork bung as calamari in a restaurant…. …”…………..”

The no-no part is the pork. Otherwise most cultures have a dish that includes the basic, er, alimentary parts of an animal. They have it in the Middle East, in Latin America and elsewhere. Usually it is included within a soup or stew: the Gulf and Iraq Pacha (lamb) or Hispanic Menudo (beef), among others. Of course the squid (khithag in my hometown), from whence the Calamari comes, also has ‘organs’, both for input and output (among other things). I think I shall list this under “Culture”. Still, consuming the tail end of a pig is a tough one to swallow (I will not be rude enough to call it pork rectum rinds). Even if one is a non-halal non-kosher ‘heathen’.
Perhaps the next link may help in this matter:

“A South Korean woman was enjoying a plate of calamari when she suddenly felt a painful “pricking, foreign-body sensation” in her mouth. It was later revealed that twelve squid spermatophores had embedded themselves in her “tongue, cheek, and gums.” Squid A Day at Science 2.0 describes spermatophores as “cups of semen”……..”

Cheers
mhg

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