Tuesday, April 26, 2011

pennant, spam, gastronomy






















The wind is invisible unless it has something to blow.

This morning, following recent observations about spam, (the luncheon meat not unwanted mail) it enters my head to buy a tin for lunch. We eat it with salad. "Too salty," says Mrs Plutarch, who vaguely remembers it from her younger days.

"I have eaten two humans - one was a man, the other a woman... They taste the same" . This month's National Geographic refers to a programme on its TV station in which Piers Gibbon explores the jungle of Papua New Guinea to find out if cannibals still exist. Apparently they do.
Posted by Picasa

3 comments:

Roderick Robinson said...

Quoting from memory:

"And then they ate the bosun tight,
He much resembled pig..."

Again from memory, I believe this to be Gilbert's parody of The Ancient Mariner and leads to the much more vivid lines:

"So I upped with his heels,
And smothered his squeals,
In the scum of the foaming broth."

Piers Gibbon missed a trick. The fact that joints of meat from humans taste similarly is less important than a comparison with our normal meatstuffs. Question: would you do it? You first, then I'll tell.

I suspect Mrs P's reaction to Spam was about as positive as things get. The fear is that it would taste of nothing.

Lucy said...

I have heard that human is too salty too, on account, I suppose, of the amount of the stuff we consume compared with other animals.

This must be a very rare occurrence, the words 'spam' and 'gastronomy' together. Might yield the odd interesting Google search.

Unknown said...

BB To be fair to Piers Gibbon he was the explorer rather than the gourmet. The words were those of one of his interlocutors.

Your're right. The Yarn of the Nancy Bell. Can't remember how the narrator solved the problem of dealing with his friend, the cook his only remaining companion.

Spam on google might well result in a wave of the sort of spam you cannot eat.