Deleterious Cognition:  a thought process, activated by a tidbit of true information often better not known or considered, that has harmful effects, causes fear and in extreme cases (and many cases are extreme), paralysis.  There are countless examples, here’s one my stomach and I observed up close the night before last.

I am partial to calamari.  I suppose I’m still at a primitive stage in my mostly vegetarian lifestyle, because, while I can’t justify eating squid and other sea creatures, I eat them sometimes.  They are not mammals, nor even birds, who express fear and other emotions, but the animals of the sea we call seafood surely prefer not to be captured, cooked and eaten.  The late, great David Foster Wallace covers this completely in his superb “Consider the Lobster”, written for Gourmet Magazine.  If you haven’t read it, you really should.

Anyway, Sekhnet heard a disturbing piece on NPR she almost instantly regretted telling me about.   It seems the rings of squid that are grilled, sauteed or deep-fried and served as calamari are virtually identical, in size, shape, texture and even, most sickeningly, flavor, to slices of washed, seasoned pig’s asshole.  Not the hole itself, but the last section of colon.  Yes, I know.  They did a blind taste test, apparently nobody was able to tell the difference, though many swore off calamari after taking the test.

The high intelligence of pigs, and the brutal death camp lives millions live, was one of my main motivations when I decided to stop eating animals raised for slaughter.   Sekhnet, a lover of all animals and a long-time  vegetarian with pescatarian tendencies, was at a farm a vet set up as a sanctuary for abused and neglected animals, and those who had somehow escaped from slaughter.  There is a photo of her shooting with her big news camera as a pig, more than twice her size, leans against her affectionately.  Hard to think of eating something so friendly.

Anyway, properly prepared, sliced pig’s colon is, apparently indistinguishable from calamari.  I ordered the seafood fettucini, which was good, but there was now the troubling question of the source of the calamari that was in it.  Every expert had been fooled, how was I to be sure it was not pig’s colon hiding in the rich sauce among the shrimps and clams?

Sekhnet saw my face and began exploring my pasta.  She pulled out a section of purple squid legs and held it up on her fork reassuringly.  It was unlikely that if they’d used part of the squid the rest would be pig’s ass, but, such is the nature of deleterious cognition that actual likelihood plays a small role and reassurance is easily brushed off.

“Clever of them,” I said to Sekhnet, eating around the circles of “calamari”.  “If I was putting pig’s ass in somebody’s seafood fettucini I’d do the same thing.”  All of this was perfectly true, still, I bravely ate a few hoops of “calamari” after eating the few sections of tentacle.  

Until I ate one particularly thick one that had a horrible taste.  They apparently had not washed this one well enough, it tasted exactly like a pig’s ass.

One side of me felt compelled to reach for the paper napkin on my lap and discreetly expel the clearly shit tasting fake calamari from my mouth.  The more civilized side prevailed.  I was at a birthday dinner, after all, and in spite of having told, moments before, grossly inappropriate real-life tales of bravura farting that made the 93 year-old birthday girl quickly change the subject, I winced and swallowed the section of pig’s colon.  It has been at least four years since I ate any part of an animal as smart and sentient as a pig.

It is much more possible that this was simply a bad piece of calamari, maybe older than the rest, maybe starting to go bad, as they say.  Become a rotten thing, shooting up the town, spray painting graffiti on the walls, pissing on the toilet seat, being a punk.  On the way to putrefaction and in a hurry to get there.  This thought, rather than comfort me, that I probably hadn’t eaten some poor pig’s asshole after all, only made me queasier.  The only question remaining was why I’d swallowed it when my taste buds knew quite clearly it was no good.

The question turned my stomach slightly and the ache there was not allayed by any thought process I could muster.  After a few hours the hard-working digestive juices had done their work, dissolving and neutralizing whatever it was I’d eaten.  What remained afterward was only the question of my susceptibility to deleterious cognition.

“I shouldn’t have mentioned that story to you, you have too much of an imagination,” said Sekhnet hours later when we’d dropped off the birthday girl and I’d told her the rest of the story.  She was not wrong in her impulse, though I don’t like to think of myself as the squeamish type who must be protected from inconvenient or otherwise disgusting truths.  I won’t be listening to the story, which Sekhnet told me to google, but it’s here for the heartier souls among you.