What's In A Name?

In his excellent treatise on food and the law, "Habeas Codfish," Barry Levenson discusses some of the nefarious tricks food manufacturers will resort to in order to part us from our grocery dollars. Included are such trickeries as "homemade," "all-natural," and "old-fashioned," terms applied willy-nilly to all manner of comestibles in hopes of making us think they're produced by kindly old grandmothers rather than huge, megalithic corporations.

All this is more or less understood, though. We accept that corporations are going to attempt to liberate our spending cash by whatever means necessary, and we cast a jaundiced eye toward most claims of wholesomeness or natural origin. We do, however, usually trust that the basic name of what we're eating, be it Pringle or polenta, will be more or less accurate.

According to no less august a source than The Wall Street Journal, however, in some cases you can't even trust the most basic nomenclature anymore. Alert Reader Sally Goodroe tipped me off to the Journal's examination.

For example, take the trendy restaurant fish known as Chilean sea bass. Hearing the name, one pictures a glistening, streamlined creature harvested lovingly from warm South American ocean waters and shipped off to your local fishmonger.

One most likely does NOT picture the prehistoric-looking creature known as the Patagonian toothfish, which is called Chilean sea bass in the United States and Antarctic or Australian sea bass in the United Kingdom. Would you be so hasty to feast on this fish if you saw what it looked like?

Of course, if you go to the sushi bar to have, say, some Chilean sea bass rolled up in sticky rice, you might want to put some of that delicious spicy green paste known as wasabi on it. The trouble here is that the "wasabi" you are most likely heaping on your gobbets of raw sea life is actually a mix of horseradish, mustard and bright green food coloring that, according to the Journal, sells for $6-10 per pound. Real wasabi, a difficult-to-cultivate root crop, sells for about $70 a pound and is very hard to find in the United States.

At least you can trust a nice, juicy steak, right? That Argentinian steak you paid top dollar for is the real goods, right? Wrong. Due to a hoof-and-mouth outbreak, there has been no appreciable amount of Argentinian beef imported into this country in more than a year. You're most likely tucking into a steak that hails from a cow from New Zealand or Australia.

Give me a Whopper and fries, please.

Thirsty?

Here's an endeavor that truly proves what joy the Internet has brought to our lives. You can now go online and help a researcher at Cal Tech figure out what name should be used for soft drinks. You see, there are different appellations ascribed to your can of cola in different regions of the country. Midwesterners seem to prefer pop, northeasterners say soda, and most folks through the south just ask for a Coke.

There's an interactive map where you can check your state, and a form on which you can enter your own preference. You can also find out what the folks who checked "other" call their drinks.

I've been perusing the "other" replies, of course. Can someone explain to me what the heck "lortbonk" means?

Speaking Of Food ...

There'll be no worrying about what to call the food at Milton Elementary School in Milton, N.H. The lunch periods there are now, by school edict, to be filled with piped-in classical music, not the sound of chattering kids.

Principal Nancy Drew, who's apparently retired from solving mysteries, instituted the controversial policy. She says the kids "needed to save their words for outside and use their mouths for eating. The children weren't eating and a lot of food was being wasted."

You know, it's just NEVER too early to introduce children to the joys of mindless conformity. The sooner we can get them marching in lockstep and working as a hive mind, the easier they'll be to control down the line.

This may end up being a valuable exercise in the democratic process, though. The kids have gotten a petition together and Ms. Drew has promised to listen to the vox populi and amend the policy, if called for.

How are things in your corner of the weird world? Anything bizarre going on? Join the ever-expanding ranks of Alert Readers and drop me a line.