Originally published at: "Quantities of intercepted bologna are so large it's hard to believe there are any pigs left in the world," says reporter about bologna seizures on Texas border | Boing Boing
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The article is worth reading for the first line alone: " The bologna arrives in darkness."
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i was once called a bologna smuggler.
of course, i could be full of baloney…
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Come on, really? Lunch meat smuggling is some kind of crime epidemic? That’s a lot of… a lot of… well, anyway, I don’t believe it.
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Many a sausage has slipped in during the dead of night.
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The fog was as thick as mayo.
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I remembered the Washington Post slogan: “democracy dies in darkness.”
The bologna arrives in the darkness.
And so we came up with a metric of democracy: if there’s a lot of bologna in your country, it’s not a democratic country. 
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Ranks up there with “Call me Ishmael” and “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…”
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You need to be made aware how iffy your groceries are. Billions are to be had. Contraband food and counterfeit food fraud is a major organized-crime-governed global epidemic which is why I was going to ask elsewhere if there was a DNA test performed on any of this? I don’t see it in the Tx article. This meat may not be anywhere close to pork. You don’t want to know.
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Wurst. Fixed it.
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It probably has a quality that is unmatched by what’s available in the US market-- so why not ship it in?
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I loved the sentence’s gonzo vibe. Quite Thompson-esque.
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It’s quite the art. I liked this one.
At the CBP El Paso field office, I found myself sucked into a U.S. government press operation that was slicker than a drill bit covered in bumper bologna. There would be no dawdling on this visit. Hutchens guided me from stop to stop on our tour, never lingering in one spot for too long. Immediately after our interview, he later explained, he’d had to go pick up a producer who was scouting the area for an upcoming Dolph Lundgren film.
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In the United States, our innocence is cosseted through the process of homogenization. Elsewhere, things may be more real.
Per the National Hot Dog and Sausage Council’s “Guide to Bologna” webpage, “U.S. government regulations require American bologna to be finely ground and without the visible pieces of fat”—unlike its older Italian cousin, mortadella. In these fractious political times, I found it moving to see that the U.S. government had at some point come to an agreement on something, even if that something was just the fat content of lunch meat: our bologna would be homogenous and neutral.
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Well, I’m going to be very disappointed when the Lundgren film eventually comes out and is not about an international bologna smuggling syndicate.
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I wonder what breed of pig they use down in Mexico? Most pork sold in the US is from a flavorless breed, often Large White. It was bred to be low fat and nearly flavorless. I’m guessing that Mexicans, oddly, like to taste their food, and that this bologna is made from what in the US would be an artisanal breed. Remember, that before the 1970s just about all meat was from such breeds.
Maybe this explains why so many Americans don’t care if they lose their ability to taste food as a side effect of getting COVID. They don’t like food that they can taste. Sorry, crisp is not a flavor.
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Are you smuggling a bologna or are you just happy to see me?
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I don’t know about all that in Tijuana, but the carneceria down the hill from me sells lunchmeat ham slices, and you can really tell it’s from an animal, instead of the finely ground stuff which cannot be distinguished from “pink slime” in the USA. Visually, it’s sort of like the difference between particle board (USA), and chipboard (Mexico).
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Illegal Bologna Smugglers is the name of my all-grrrrrl Klezmer punk band.
Also…
I loved the sentence’s gonzo vibe. Quite Thompson-esque.
jerwinBBS
It’s quite the art. I liked this one.
At the CBP El Paso field office, I found myself sucked into a U.S. government press operation that was slicker than a drill bit covered in bumper bologna. There would be no dawdling on this visit. Hutchens guided me from stop to stop on our tour, never lingering in one spot for too long. Immediately after our interview, he later explained, he’d had to go pick up a producer who was scouting the area for an upcoming Dolph Lundgren film.
We had two bags of pepperoni slices, seventy-five gnocchi, five sheets of high-powered jalapeños, a salt shaker half full of chili flakes, and a whole galaxy of multi-colored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers, and also a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of chianti, a pint of raw oysters and two dozen pickled eggs.
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