Omni-sausage is an idea I had for a sausage that is made out of equal portions of ground up meat from every edible animal on the planet. If the omni-sausage were to have any appeal, I’d guess it would be as a novelty (“I just ate a little bit of… everything!”) or a delicacy (since omni-sausage would probably be pretty expensive.) There is also the off chance that it would taste good, too.
Anyway, would you eat it?
Also, I’m having trouble deciding what I mean by “every edible animal on the planet.” I mean it’d be pretty impossible to get a sample of every edible species of animal on the planet together in a close enough window of time to grind them all up before some start to go bad. For now, I’m going with wikipedia’s list of meat animals as a working ingredient list for omni-sausage (excluding of course the “artificial meat” and perhaps including “human.”)
Mmm, so how do you think it’d taste? My guess is that it’d taste like chicken.
My guess is that the rank taste from the predators on that list would dominate. IME, herbivorous animals tend to taste better than carnivores when we are talking about terrestrial creatures.
Considering the number of endangered animals on the list, I would try to get you or anyone doing this put in jail. I know you’re not serious, but as long as we’re conjecturing that is my honest answer.
You could mitigate the predator-rankiness by adjusting the weighting of the meat according to trophic levels. I.e. beef, who are vegetarians, would get full weight, whereas those who eat just vegetarians should get a ranking approximately %10 that of beef. This would solve many things:
– Lower weight for gamier-tasting foods, such as fish and land predators.
– Similar impact on species per pound, as the biomass at any given trophic level decreses.
– Less biomagnification of poisons.
That said, if something like this were available, I’d probably try it just to see what it tastes like. Then again, I’ve tried lutefisk (and wouldn’t mind a wee bit of well-cooked haggis.)
Depending on how the proportions are weighted, most of the sausage could plausibly be made up of insects. Ants, termites, and beetles are both numerous and, mostly, edible. If you defined “equal portions of…” as being from each species, then you’d need bits of pavement ants, honeypot ants, driver ants, and so on.
Not saying this is a bad thing. Ants have a surprisingly tart lemony taste, and lemon-pepper sausage is pretty good, right?
Well if it is proportioned by species then it’l be mostly beetle.
Approx 40% beetle 50% other insect types 10% everything else (guesimating from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beetle )
Fair enough, What Exit?. Does it bother you that human is also on the list?
Cervaise & Bippy the Beardless, good point about all the bugs. I don’t mind putting insects in omni-sausage, but since there are so very many species, maybe it’d be better to just lump bugs into general categories (e.g. “ants” and “beetles”) so that a variety of bugs are included but don’t overwhelm the sausage. Possibly each bug category could be a blend (literally) of different species, so all those ants Cervaise listed would all contribute to the “ant blend.”
I think you’d do better by having different levels of “omni” sausage. You know:
Chicken, turkey, emu, penguin: bird sausage.
Ant, beetle, assorted bug guts: bug sausage.
Lions, tigers, bears, wolves: alpha sausage.
Rats, bunnies, and roadkill: omega sausage.
Spinach, cabbage, weeds: veggie sausage.
Mix of all of the above: surprise sausage. Or bake it in a flaky crust and call it sausage pi.
Yes, but I somehow missed that. I was already seeing red at Tiger and lost it on Dolphin & Whale.
Well at least with human included I know even a right wing NRA judge would toss you in jail. I’ll miss Omniscient though, I like his posts most of the time.
I’d be concerned that omnisausage would be bland, characterless, a kind of Universal Meatstuff.
Better yet: why not make it out of tofu with interesting herbs/spices/flavorings and tell everybody it’s made with endangered critter trimmin’s, then record their outraged reactions. Performance Art You Can Eat!
Fair enough, What Exit?. Does it bother you that human is also on the list?