Why am I always the last to know?

Fred Armisen, of SNL and Portlandia fame, was recently announced as a 2014 James Beard award winner. It seems that way back on Jan. 11, 2013, the podcast This American Life had Armisen on board as a guest host (because he does an impression of Ira Glass) and that episode entitled Doppelgängers included a segment (heh) by Ben Calhoun that theorized about pork bung being used as “imitation calamari.”

Listen here: This American Life – Doppelgängers

I know! You people are supposed to bring things like this to my attention. Stop sitting down on the job. (Heh.)

Sadly, the podcast ultimately wasn’t able to prove that this sort of switcheroo has actually happened. The piece pretty much relegates the idea to an urban food legend. But it did quite convincingly prove that it is possible. They threw some real calamari and some bung in the deep frier and did some blind taste tests and some of their tasters picked the decoy as the real McCoy.
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