Monday, August 11, 2008

How did they find this out?

Apparently, hagfish slime tastes like chicken. Unborn chicken, granted, but chicken nonetheless.

You have to wonder how this discovery came about. "Hey, George, come here and lick this hagfish. Does this taste like egg white to you, too?"

8 comments:

  1. That lovely "eelskin" wallet of yours is made of ... hagfish. Some names are even less appealing than "eel", apparently.

    Hagfish live in the way-down-there and bajillions of them eat dead whales and mob victims, leaving only the bones and the concrete shoes.

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  2. Horrible.

    I wonder if there are known cases of hagfish eating live humans?

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  3. I don't know about hagfish, but their close cousins, lampreys, might latch onto you if you stayed in the water long enough. Lampreys prey on Lake Trout in the Great Lakes, and are a great pest there.

    And yah, hagfish had their moment of fame back in the 90's as eelskin wallets.

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  4. Heck, I've wondered how many foods came to be, well, food.

    Consider one example, manioc root. Ground, used as flour. Except, well, its juice is horrendously poisonous. It has to be squeezed out: but enough is left to be still poisonous. So it has to be wetted and squeezed again.

    I wonder how many experiments were done before this was determined?

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  5. JohnA: Starvation is the mother of invention (of new foods, at least)?

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  6. I can understand a starving person eating a butt-ugly fish, but why in the hell would anyone want to eat the snotty-looking slime off it? I've eaten eels (one of my favorite fish), but you won't catch me munching down on the skin or the guts.

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  7. My guess - the "bet" involved a redneck, copeous quantities of adult beverage and the quote, "Watch this...", prior to the taste test.

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  8. I double-dog dare you to try it.

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