by MARCELLA CARBORUNDUREM-McVORTVORT, Alternate Reality News Service Food and Drink Writer
When you think about it, there really isn't much you can do with pigshit.*
You used to be able to use it for fertilizer. Then, scientists determined that the antibiotics used in factory farms seeped into the pigshit and combined with other chemicals in the environment; when breathed in by innocent passersby, the fumes from this combination made them impassioned lovers of black velvet Elvis paintings.
Clearly, this was inhumane. So, now, the pigshit collects at the bottom of hills. Steep ones. With large craters at the bottom. Collected pigshit is sometimes referred to as "runoff," "slurry" or "that growing lake of foul-smelling, toxic shit that nobody knows what to do with, but somebody better figure out what to do with soon because it's killing property values throughout the county and – hey, is that a black velvet Elvis painting?"
Enter science. Researchers at the Ethiopia Institute of Food Sciences have developed the first pig that eats normal food and excretes truffles. That's right: white gold. Texas tea scones. ...Truffles.
"They're only good enough for three star restaurants," admitted EIFS director of porcine research Carmen Infantillo, "but, considering that the research is still in its early stages, I'd say that is quite an accomplishment!"
Infantillo, looking for a method of turning pigshit into something useful to humanity, experimented with splicing various genes into pig embryos. After 20 years (and more pork roasts than her research team could ever have imagined they would eat – or wanted to), she happened upon a combination of trout, truffle and firefly genes.
"That gave us a thin stream of truffle tasting pigshit," Infantillo allowed. "It was more a kind of truffle soup than anything else. Obviously, nobody would eat anything so disgusting, so we went back to the drawing board."
Ten years after that, the EIFS team had a breakthrough when they added one final ingredient, which they call "secret." This new ingredient caused the liquid truffle-tasting excrement to solidify, much to the relief of both the researchers and the pigs they were working on.
"Oh, give me a break from all of this 'secret ingredient' crap!" cried Barter Bashir, chief gastronomic researcher at France's School of Disgusting Foods, who had been following his own research agenda trying to turn pigshit into a reasonable substitute for vegetable soup. "It...it's like the secret formula for Coke. What's the secret? A little syrup, a little bubbled water, et voila! Add a little cocaine until somebody killjoy complains, and that's that. Or, Colonel Sanders' secret recipe of seven herbs and spices – oh, mon dieu! In the gastronomic sciences, that was a secret for all of about 12 seconds!"
"Besides," he added after he had a chance to calm down, "everybody knows the 'secret ingredient' is an enzyme secreted in the bile of sea otters! Sheesh!"
"Once we have perfected the system," Infantillo enthused, ignoring Bashir's outburst, "the poorest people in the world will be able to eat truffles! Of course, we still have to figure out how to get them steaks to put the truffles on, but, what the hell, I can only work on one problem at a time! In the meantime, everybody wins!"
"Not quite everybody," cautioned Miles van der Stapley, editor of Truffle Hunting Sesquicentennially. "Time was that pigs would take hours finding just the right tree, in whose roots the tender morsels dwelled. Imagine the thrill of the hunt! Now, all the pig has to do is turn around, and, oh, look what we have here! Truffles! And, wait a couple of minutes, and the pig turns around and guess what it has found now!
"This will almost definitely kill amateur truffle hunting!"
That, uhh, is a problem, of course. Perhaps a bigger problem, though, is: is the public ready to eat truffles that had been created in the digestive tracts of pigs? When I asked her this question, Infantillo laughed gaily and responded, "Oh, you would be surprised what we put together in the kitchen that people happily put in their mouths. There won't be any problem as long as they don't know, and, really, who is going to tell them?"
I watched Infantillo for over 90 minutes, waiting to see if she would show the slightest glimmer of understanding of the journalistic process. Then, I gave up and returned to the office to file this report.
* Throughout this article, I am, of course, using the term "pigshit" in its precise scientific meaning. Anything else would be vulgar.