During my life I have tried many unusual foods, from chocolate-coated mealworms to Impala while I was in Kenya. If fact, while I was in Kenya I was intrigued to see 'lion steaks' on the hotel's laminated lunchtime menu and inquired of the waiter as to just how many people order the lion meat.“We get this a lot,” came the chap's reply, “It is a typing error it should read 'loin steak'...”
Anyway, I digress. The reason I mention unusual food is because of a certain product that was featured on the Think Geek website last April: Canned Unicorn Meat.
As you might well have guessed, this was an April fool made by the website. The website's description of the product is as follows:
Pâté is passé.
Excellent source of sparkles!
Unicorns, as we all know, frolic all over the world, pooping rainbows and marshmallows wherever they go. What you don't know is that when unicorns reach the end of their lifespan, they are drawn to County Meath, Ireland. The Sisters at Radiant Farms have dedicated their lives to nursing these elegant creatures through their final days. Taking a cue from the Kobe beef industry, they massage each unicorn's coat with Guinness daily and fatten them on a diet comprised entirely of candy corn.
As the unicorn ages, its meat becomes fatty and marbled and the living bone in the horn loses density in a process much like osteoporosis. The horn's outer layer of keratin begins to develop a flavor very similar to candied almonds. Blending the crushed unicorn horn into the meat adds delightful, crispy flavor notes in each bite. We are confident you will find a world of bewilderment in every mouthful of scrumptious unicorn meat.
http://www.thinkgeek.com/stuff/41/unicorn-meat.shtml
It also included the slogan 'Unicorn meat: the other white meat.'
And this was when things got really interesting...
In June this reached the ears of the USA's National Pork Board and they were not impressed. In their anger that one of their slogans ('the other white meat') was being used to apparently market this new meat they rattled off a cease-and-desist letter to Think Geek. However, they didn't stop to question whether the flesh of a mythical animal not recognised or discovered by science could really be farmed and sold by the can. The letter was, according to Think Geek, 12 pages long and well researched, so probably made some lawyers a lot of money, but in no place mentioned that the 'product' was actually non-existent and a parody. As a result of the product being an obvious parody that in no way caused harm to the pork board, there was no actual legal case to answer and the letter overlooked this. Think Geek were good enough to issue a public apology for any confusion caused:
It was never our intention to cause a national crisis and misguide American citizens regarding the differences between the pig and the unicorn," said Scott Kauffman, President and CEO of Geeknet. In fact, ThinkGeek's canned unicorn meat is sparkly, a bit red, and not approved by any government entity.
Companies do have to protect their trademarks from being used by others in for nefarious purposes but this is perhaps the funniest example of using a sledgehammer to crack a nut that I have seen.
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