Food porn to the max

A wild goose barnacle chase | Life and style | guardian.co.uk

The Guardian is a pretty good site for food porn, and there's no better example than this post about eating barnacles in Portugal.

The food itself is described as follows:

The goose barnacle has to be one of the most beautiful foods on the planet. The bright enamelled head with its ruby lips sits atop a snakeskin sleeve which pulls away to reveal a glossy, lucent finger of flesh, marbled and grey at the neck, bright orange at the tip. They're the punks of the crustacean family.

Actually,  the writer is making them sound like the disturbingly genitalia-like members of the crustacean family.

As to the experience of eating them, well:

Not a drop of goodness escapes the barnacle when it's cooked. The tightly-woven sleeve acts like a bag, sealing in the essence of the ocean. There's a gentle intensity to the barnacle flesh. Similar, in a way, to octopus, only more refined. They're nothing like a mussel, all tubes and organs. They're simpler. Purer. The best of the sea boiled down into a mouthful.

But goose barnacles don't just taste of the ocean: they actually immerse you in it. Quite often (unless you're an expert, which I'm not) when you pinch off the sleeve, you get a fat squirt of brine in the eye or down your chest. It's a strangely mimetic experience. In being eaten, the goose barnacle shares the theatre of its life with you.

You finish the meal wet, as if you've just been out on a wave-splashed rock with your mouth open.

For good measure, the writer concludes with a phenomena that often happens with that other pleasure of the flesh:

 And yet, after 20 minutes on the beach to dry the front of your shirt you find your thoughts turning back to the barnacle.

I trust I'm not the only person to have successfully decoded the writing.

In the comments that follow the article, there are quite a few people scoffing at the prose, but I liked this entry in particular:

Sweet? Living in Galicia. I've had them many times. To me, they taste of nothing but rubber in sea water. It's small wonder they need the myth that they are an aphrodisiac - just like oysters and the dreadful durian fruit.

Interesting to note that they used to used only as fertiliser on the fields and that, during Spain's years of hunger in the 50s, the locals still wouldn't eat them.

Wonderful what marketing can do.

Oh, and they can reach 300 euros a kilo at Xmas. In Madrid at least.

I guess it will callos (tripe) next for the treatment.

 Update:   I suppose if I'm talking seafood as a stand-in for genitalia, it's hard to avoid the fuss being made over the whole Slipper/Ashby texts which give new meaning to "things you wish you never knew a politician thought or said".   If Slipper likes mussels, even if he also has a interest in goose barnacles, does talking this way really indicate misogyny?   Bad taste and embarrassing to hear, sure; much like Prince Charles' weird way of chatting to his girlfriend.   And it's not as if a lot of women don't have less than complementary things to say about men's rude bits:  if you Google the topic, you'll see a lot of consensus on the matter that quite a lot of straight women think they may be useful but aren't at all attractive.

I think a lot of right wingers like Bolt are just getting precious about this because they want to see Slipper go, and Labor embarrassed.