The man running the store now looked so stressed out I could practically hear his own T-cells suiciding.
Sarah went on, “It’s hard to believe Raymond escaped his bio-containment stall at Bonriki Airport—a lovely airport, by the way. But don’t worry, we’ll have him out of your store in a jiffy, just as soon as we can pay for the multiple carts of groceries required by our crew. Our silly supply ship got marooned in the trash vortex. They called it propeller fatigue. The ocean basically turned into white glue around it.”
Elspeth added, “Such a tragedy that vortex is. I hope humanity one day finds a way of making things right with Mother Nature.” She paused and added, “Go green!”
The store manager was drenched in sweat and vibrating with worry. Sarah dragged him to the till, saying, “Do you have any jams, jellies or preserves? They make such lovely souvenirs.”
“Look!” shrieked Elspeth. “Thong bikinis for sale!”
By this time, the store had totally cleared out.
I heard Neal calling me and found him in aisle 3: Tinned Luncheon Meats.
“Holy shit!”
“It’s Spam, Ray, an entire aisle of Spam—or, rather, a whole aisle of products highly similar to Spam, yet not really Spam!”
It was almost holy the way the store’s sole functioning fluorescent tube lit aisle 3’s primary-coloured grids of rectangular tins from all over the planet—although mostly they seemed to be from China.
“Neal, most of these cans are from fucking China.”
Neal was crestfallen. “I may be snackered on Ecstasy, Ray, but no way in a million years could you make me eat what’s inside any of these tins. Christ only knows what’s in them.”
Drywall
Melamine
Hitchhikers
Nurses
Diseased sheep lungs
Crisps
Cat food too scary for cats
Jellied donkey piss
Yoga mats
Vinyl pool toys
Venereal ovaries
Braided gerbil urethras
Shredded car parts
Dolphins
Neon tetras
Tetra Pak boxes
Broken dreams
Kittens with mittens
Mutton leavings
Silicon chips
Pregnant fetal pigs
Unsold Shrek DVDs
That bucket of blood from Carrie
Angioplasty scrapings
Wank tissues
Biopsy leftovers
Sentient colon polyps
I sat down on the floor and opened a sample can of God’s Meat with its little key. Its clear jelly bits soaked up a ray of sun coming through a plastic roof vent. Fucking marvellous: like the beginning of the universe, really. Subtle beige chunks of tallow surrounded by pinkish grey mystery tissue: fine Roman marble! Fuck that piece of red plastic Neal stole from me!
I scooped into the can, gorging like a seagull on bites of its holy contents. Here was the answer to the mysteries of life. Here I found truth. Here I found something to live for. Here I … here I blacked out.
Potted meat food product, or potted meat, is made of cooked meat product, often creamed, minced or ground, which is poured into cans, sealed and heat-processed. Beef, pork, chicken and turkey are used, as well as non-skeletal meats. What is a non-skeletal meat, you ask? You may regret having asked. Non-skeletal meats include organs and glands, as well as extremities such as feet and tails or retinas or eyelids or udders.
The canning produces a homogeneous texture and flavour, but lower-cost ingredients can also affect quality. For example, mechanically separated chicken or turkey is a paste-like product made by forcing crushed bone and tissue through a sieve to separate bone from tissue. In the United States, mechanically separated poultry has been used in poultry products since 1969. But the real question here is, What do the Chinese use in their potted meats? Insert nightmare here.
From The Happy Isles of Oceania by Paul Theroux (1992)
“It was a theory of mine that former cannibals of Oceania now feasted on Spam because Spam came the nearest to approximating the porky taste of human flesh. ‘Long pig,’ as they called a cooked human being in much of Melanesia. It was a fact that the people-eaters of the Pacific had all evolved, or perhaps degenerated, into Spam-eaters. And in the absence of Spam they settled for corned beef, which also had a corpsy flavor.”
31
Okay.
We’ve all of us gone overboard once or twice in our time and perhaps had a lager or two too many. Or perhaps a flute of champagne past the 0.08 limit. I mean, life is short! Rejoice! And who among us could judge?
When I came to, I found myself on a bamboo deck of some sort, walled on three sides with woven panels made of palm fronds and pandanus leaves, but with no wall in front of me, just the vision of an aquamarine lagoon with gently whooshing waves filled with gumdrops and cartoon characters. My pillow was soft and cool, and the single thin sheet over me was heaven on my skin. I could smell flowers. Okay now, this was the Pacific I’d dreamed of.