My daughter is in a biology class where they are learning about DNA.
That’s a pretty remarkable phrase if you stop to think about it. I mean, when I was in high school about a hundred years ago, DNA wasn’t something people talked about in daily conversation.
Crooks were caught with fingerprints and smoking guns.
My kids look at me incredulously when I tell them no, we didn’t do DNA analysis in my biology class. Of course, they also can’t believe we lived without cell phones and microwaves.
To do the DNA analysis, the teacher has to come up with some sort of matter that will contain all the DNA stuff. In my daughter’s class, the students were given a little test tube with a glob of sweetbreads.
She brought it home to show the family. Such a sweet girl to share this with us.
In case you don’t know, sweetbreads are cow brains. (Anytime people cook or eat a body part that would be considered really gross, they name it something else so you’ll eat it anyway.)
I’ll never forget when I went with a group to a restaurant that had “turkey fries” on the menu. Apparently, everybody else knew what they were, but I sure didn’t. They ordered a huge platter and told me they were slivers of turkey meat, battered and fried (they lied).
I ate a bunch of them, and they were pretty good. After I was finished, my friends ‘fessed up that turkey fries are really turkey testicles. Haven’t eaten them since. Don’t really care how good they are.
Mountain oysters are beef testicles, menudo is blood soup, chitlins are intestines, I think. I can’t believe they haven’t come up with a better name for liver. Uck. The concept of eating the organ that cleanses the body of toxins is gross enough, but then you look at a liver, and well, all I have to say is the first person that ate one was really hungry.
Anyway, my daughter did not know that she had been working on brains. The class performed all the necessary experiments on the sweetbreads to determine the DNA of this particular cow. Some got sort of queasy.
Then I heard the rest of the story.
A couple of years ago when the teacher first tried the DNA tests, the matter that she was able to get for the experiment was the equivalent of mountain oysters, but from a dog. Dog oysters.
As each team placed their samples on the cutting plate in front of them, groans were heard throughout the room. All the groans were coming from boys.
Their faces were pale and their hands were shaking. “We just can’t do it!” they explained. Turns out guys have a special bond with dogs, and in particular dog oysters.
No so with the girls. The females grabbed the scalpels and started whacking away, happily slicing and dicing. This, of course, made the boys even that much more uncomfortable. Shades of John and Lorraine Bobbitt, you know.
So, they don’t do the dog oyster thing anymore. Hence, the sweetbreads.
