History Main / MysteryMeat

* If you live in a heavily Hispanic part of America, and a Hispanic lady goes door-to-door with fresh tamales for sale, buy the tamales. Eat the tamales. They are ''good tamales''. Just never ask which parts of the pig the tamales are ''made'' from. Tacos de lengua[[note]]Beef tongue[[/note]], tripas[[note]]small intestines cleaned, boiled, and fired aka Chitterlings, a type of soul food[[/note]], and barbacoa[[note]]beef face meat/goat meat/lamb cuts steamed until tender[[/note]] are also all very tasty dishes, and an authentic staple of northern Mexico. None of which are made from things that most Americans would voluntarily eat. (Note to Americans--and many other peoples, so don't think you're off the hook--Mexicans think you're ''stupid'' for that: it's only been since the US government began heavily subsudizing beef production after World War 2 that the price of beef fell low enough that people largely stopped eating those parts on a regular basis.)

* In 2016, the Nissin noodle company introduced a new line of Cup Noodle proudly marketed as "Mystery Meat" (謎肉). Presumably this doesn't have the same connotations in Japan that it does in the West, since the product line has been quite successful and branched out to include new flavors (Kimchi Mystery Meat, etc.) It seems the company is aware that Westerners have a different conception of "mystery meat", since they haven't used the term in English marketing material. (For the record, the meat is apparently freeze-dried pork bulked out with soybeans.)

* 'Film/TheGreatOutdoors'': Roman refers to hot dogs as being made from "lips and assholes". In the next scene, when raccoons raid the cabin's trash, one of the raccoons says the exact same thing.

* ''Literature/ElevenTwentyTwoSixtyThree'': Al Templeton's diner infamously served beef at below cost, which should be economic suicide for a restaurant, leading to rumors that his food contained road kill, despite it tasting perfectly good. Al's food was legitimately 100% beef, no disgusting filler at all; the reason it was so cheap is because his diner secretly contained a time portal leading to the same location in September, 1958, and Al used it to [[MundaneUtility buy meat at 50's prices]].

* ''ComicBook/GIJoeARealAmericanHeroMarvel'': One issue has a group of Joe recruits being put through deliberately harsh training to see who cracks. Lunch is "mystery meat on a shingle". One disgusted recruit asks "How do they get it so grey?".

* ''ComicBook/TheSimpsons'': In one story, Homer enters an eating contest where the objective is to wolf down as many meat pies as possible within a time limit. Homer manages to eat all but one of his allotment, and is spurred on to finish the last one when he hallucinates the ghosts of the animals that went into it telling him to not let their deaths be in vain -- a cow, a pig, a rat, and a platypus.

** ''VideoGame/FalloutNewVegas'' has "Strange Meat" and Strange Meat Pie, which are actually fairly commonly-found food items. It's implied that Strange Meat is [[spoiler:[[TheSecretOfLongPorkPies human flesh deliberately prepared in such a way as to disguise it as something else]], so that it can be sold to people who don't realize what they're buying]]. According to Old Ben, one butcher in Freeside made a [[IncrediblyLamePun killing]] off of this practice, and sold it cheaply enough to put Ben's father's shop out of business. This continued until people started getting "shakes" (strongly implied to be [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuru_(disease) Kuru]]) from eating it, including the butcher himself, who eventually died from the disease.

[[caption-width-right:320:[[IAteWhat Oh crap...]]]]

* In the first episode of ''LightNovel/NyarukoCrawlingWithLove'', Nyarko serves Mahiro a lunch box she made for him. He likes it, but remarks that the meat doesn't taste like fried chicken and asks what it is. Her only response is a NotSoInnocentWhistle, and when he threatens to puke it back up all she's willing to say is it's not dangerous to humans. For the rest of the series Nyarko is a bit more open about her meals (but Mahiro still refuses to eat anything that doesn't come from Earth... [[LoopholeAbuse and then she tries to serve him pterodactyl]], which leads to him further specifying '''modern''' Earth).

* ''Series/YesMinister'' has the Euro-sausage standardization incident in the Christmas special "Party Games". British sausages contain too high a proportion of rusk, and the "meat" they contain is (accurately described, at least for cheaper suppliers) unpalatable abattoir waste and scraps, so the EU attempts a reclassify them by the more accurate but highly unappetizing term "emulsified high-fat offal tubes"[[note]]Disturbingly, the scene in question actually depicts a fairly accurate description of the quality of the typical sausage for sale in British supermarkets at the time the episode was filmed[/note]]. Hacker then twists the relevant information to make it look like the EU is planning to ban British sausages, and the resulting political hubbub gives Jim an opportunity to raise his profile and take advantage of an unrelated political crisis to become PM.

* ''Series/YesMinister'' has the Euro-sausage standardization incident in the Christmas special "Party Games". British sausages contain too high a proportion of rusk, and the "meat" they contain is (accurately described, at least for cheaper suppliers) unpalatable abattoir waste and scraps, so the EU attempts a reclassify them by the more accurate but highly unappetizing term "emulsified high-fat offal tubes". Hacker then twists the relevant information to make it look like the EU is planning to ban British sausages, and the resulting political hubbub gives Jim an opportunity to raise his profile and take advantage of an unrelated political crisis to become PM.

* Many people have interesting stories to tell about the dubious quality of something sold in the school cafeteria, though not all of them involve the "meat". School cafeteria chili is a favorite target because God alone knows what it was to begin with before it went into the pot, and the cooking process makes identification nearly impossible.

Food of unknown composition. Like value-priced sausages, which is all the parts of meat they don't put in the butcher shop display; discount meatloaf at a [[WrongSideOfTheTracks skidrow]] diner, which has mysterious chunks that aren't meat; and stew made by a CampCook with a mix of hard-to-identify items floating in it.

Food of unknown composition. Like sausages, which is all the parts of meat they don't put in dog food.

Scares from the early 20th century aside, cheap sausage is generally made of chunked pork or other meat, some offal and other things wrapped in intestine and loaded with salt. This is unhealthy in large quantities, but there's nothing inherently ''toxic'' about it. TV has you believe that hot dogs are Mystery Meat.

Meatloaf is another scary food, which ignores the entire point of adding filler to it to stretch a beef budget and not to cover up bad cooking. Meatloaf is always portrayed as some horrific dried-out swamp log, although this is largely true of any ''improperly'' baked food.

* The mystery meat in the ''Literature/TheLordOfTheRings'' is not left un-riffed in the [[http://flyingmoose.org/tolksarc/book/book3_03.htm definitive E-Text]]:

%%* ''Film/{{Meatballs}}'': Creator/BillMurray.
%%-->"Attention. Here's an update on tonight's dinner. It was veal. I repeat, veal. The winner of tonight's mystery meat contest is Jeffrey Corbin, who guessed 'some kind of beef'."

** Many Cooking recipes use Mystery Meat as an ingredient. It drops from all manners of beasts as well, regardless of whether they resemble mammals, reptiles, birds, or bugs. including vultures and giant scorpions.

** The most recent expansion has something similar, Chilled Meat, that is Northrend's version of Mystery Meat. Apparently, due to the conditions of the northern continent, it comes already refrigerated once you're done butchering.

** The ''Cataclysm'' expansion gives us the Unidentifiable Meat Dish, the description of which reads: [[FromBadToWorse "Somehow even more sinister than Mystery Meat."]] And this time, we ''don't'' know what's in it, but the fact that it can only be bought from vendors belonging to the local insane ApocalypseCult does not bode particularly well.

** Despite the common assumption that hot dogs, bologna, and other very finely minced sausages have that texture due to God-knows-what kind of scary ingredients, WebVideo/LifeOfBoris once made Doktorskaya Kolbasa (basically a Russian version of bologna) from scratch, using nothing but fresh pork, seasoning, ice water, and a food processor. The result was indistinguishable from a similar sausage bought in a store.

* ''LightNovel/RebuildWorld'': In the slums Akira grew up as a StreetUrchin in, the main supply of food is what the government hands out twice per day. These foods include things like meat produced by enigmatic LostTechnology devices, plants grown in radioactive fields, and meat from {{Nanomachine}} infested monsters, with the purpose being to test if these foods are safe for commercial sale. This sometimes results in horrific mutations. The food has warning labels, but most everyone in the slums NeverLearnedToRead and they’re TooDesperateToBePicky even if they could. After Akira earns enough money, he donates funds for Sheryl to make sure the kids in the slum gang the two established together have decent food and can read.

* ''Wiki/SCPFoundation'': [[http://www.scp-wiki.net/scp-1361 SCP-1361]] is a [[AttackOfTheKillerWhatever living, man-eating mystery meat]].

* If you live in a heavily Hispanic part of America, and a Hispanic lady goes door-to-door with fresh tamales for sale, buy the tamales. Eat the tamales. They are ''good tamales''. Just never ask which parts of the pig the tamales are ''made'' from. Tacos de lengua[[note]]Beef tongue[[/note]], tripas[[note]]small intestines cleaned, boiled, and fired aka Chitterlings, a type of soul food[[/note]], and barbacoa[[note]]beef face meat/goat meat/lamb cuts steamed until tender[[/note]] are also all very tasty dishes, and an authentic staple of northern Mexico. None of which are made from things that most Americans would voluntarily eat. (Note to Americans--and many other peoples, so don't think you're off the hook--Mexicans think you're ''stupid'' for that.)

* In the first episode of ''LightNovel/NyarukoCrawlingWithLove'', Nyarko serves Mahiro a lunch box she made for him. He likes it, but remarks that the meat doesn't taste like fried chicken and asks what it is. Her only response is a NotSoInnocentWhistle, and when he threatens to puke it back up all she's willing to say is it's not dangerous to humans. For the rest of the series Nyarko is a bit more open about her meals, changing this trope out for AlienLunch (but Mahiro still refuses to eat anything that doesn't come from Earth... [[LoopholeAbuse and then she tries to serve him pterodactyl]], which leads to him further specifying '''modern''' Earth).

Another common accusation leveled at such foods is that they're made from creatures not traditionally considered edible: vermin like [[ReducedToRatburgers rats]] and [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Squab_as_food (these days)]] pigeons; domestic animals like cats and dogs; or, worse yet, stray cats and dogs, which are verminous and domestic at once. ([[YourNormalIsOurTaboo Opinions vary]] [[ValuesDissonance as to what creatures]] [[ForeignQueasine are considered edible]] -- sometimes even with the passage of time, as with pigeons no longer being edible in the US.) If someone finds out what they ate, expect IAteWhat as a response.