So this story on ChinaSMACK, which offers English-language translations of odds and ends found on the Chinese internet, caught our attention: "Blue Glowing Pork Meat Found in Shanghai."
For one, the story itself is sort of priceless: Apparently, one "Miss Chen" gets up to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night and notices a faint blue light coming from her kitchen, only to discover that the source of this ghostly glow is none other than the slab of pork that she'd purchased the day before and left on the table (left on the table!?).
Second, there's a tone of eager, earnest amazement that runs throughout the article which makes it feel less like a digitized dispatch from a teeming megatropolis on the other side of the globe and more like something you'd find in the dusty archives of, say, the Walnut Grove Gazette. To wit, "In order to be sure she wasn't seeing things, Miss Chen woke up her family to look at this piece of strange meat together. The pork glowed in the dark but returned to 'normal' in the morning. Both astonished and afraid, Miss Chen's family did not dare to eat from this piece of pork again. Yesterday afternoon, this reporter rushed to Miss Chen's home and saw this piece of glowing pork."
If you've ever flipped through yellowing copies of old small-town newspapers, this has a familiar ring, like the sorts of stories found beneath headlines declaring, "Local Man's Garden Squash Bears Holy Visage."
But could it be true? Given that "Miss Chen" lives in Shanghai and we, um, don't, that makes the task of verification a little more difficult than darting over to Old Man McGillicutty's place to see if said squash really looks like Jesus.
An "exhaustive" search of the literature (thanks Google Books!) revealed astounding evidence that, yes, meat stored in conditions that in the U.S. would saddle you with a health code violation can indeed start to glow like the ghost of Christmas past.
Dr. Robert Ostertag, for example, discusses of the matter at some length in his Handbook of Meat Inspection published in 1904, in which he catalogs reported incidents of strangely glowing meat spanning centuries, from 16th-century Rome to 18th-century Vienna.
Take heart, Miss Chen, apparently someone named "Neusch" in Basel observed in 1877 "that pork which was kept in a receptacle in a pantry emitted a green light of such intensity that people were able to recognize each other by it and to read the time on their watches."
Fast-forward 50 years, and the more scientifically minded (but no less literarily inspired) writers of Meat Hygiene name the likely culprit: phosphorescent bacteria, such as Pseudomonas cyanagenus, which can cause contaminated meat to appear "as if it were studded with stars."
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