Unusual pig

Izzy Sommers, MD[retired]
7-140 Elmview Street, West
Welland, ON L3C 4K7, Canada
TELEPHONE: 905-788-2237
EMAIL: canadizzy@yahoo.ca

Monday, November 28, 2005

The Editor and the Staff
The Welland Tribune
228 East Main Street
Welland, ON L3B 5P5, Canada

TELEPHONE: 905-732-2411
EMAIL: tribune@wellandtribune.ca

RE: Oxy-moronic porker

Dear Editor and Staff::

Just this afternoon, I was shopping at a locally owned, well established supermarket, known for it’s fresh produce and high quality of meats. I spotted a package of meat labelled, PORK SHOULDER BUTT STEAK. It looked like a blade steak, something you’d see in a cow, usually called a chuck steak. A butt steak, in a cow is also distinctive, usually round, with a round bone in the middle. I’ve usually been able to spot the “eye of the round” in the middle and know it to be extra tender and tasty. I believe the equivalent in the pig, without the bone, is the ham, but I have seen ham steaks with the little round bone, as well. I was confused and couldn’t imagine the anatomic contortion required to call a steak, a shoulder butt steak in any animal. I thought a mistake had been made and perhaps it should have been a PORK SHOULDER BLADE STEAK.

I asked some of the shoppers and they didn’t know what it was. I asked an employee and she didn’t know, but she was willing to ask a butcher for me. The butcher took the time to come out of the back room and tell me there was no mistake. She didn’t know exactly what it was but she said the government had left her instructions to sell that cut of pig as a PORK SHOULDER BLADE STEAK. She was not, apparently, in a mood to entertain the obvious. Or, she was bound to secrecy and her lips were sealed, rather than pursed, as I perceived them.

I had several thoughts. It is in fact not unusual for the government, or even the courts, to make a decision in favour of something that is not obviously logical. What comes to mind is an old joke about a camel being a horse constructed by a government committee. Optimistically, corrections will be made as time goes on by saner committee members, legislators, senators, cabinet and prime ministers, judges and jurors. Also, since SHOULDER BUTT STEAK seems to be an anatomical oxymoron, the truth will be obvious in a shorter time. Surely, someone will convert it to a de-oxymoron, just as ribonucleic acid, RNA, is converted to de-oxy-ribonucleic acid, DNA. Another far-fetched possibility is that, by genetic modification, a special hybrid pig has been secretly produced, which when butchered, does, in fact, produce a SHOULDER BUTT piece, superior to the cow, and other livestock, which can’t do this. This would tend to prove Sir George Orwell’s satiric speculation in his 1930's book, ANIMAL FARM, wherein the animals revolted and took over a farm. It was an obvious satire of the Russian Revolution. The pigs, led by Napoleon, the head commissar pig, made several illogical rules to show the superiority of the pigs. One was, “All Animals Are Equal But Pigs Are More Equal!”

Thank you for listening.

Sincerely,

Izzy Sommers.