6 Foods That Aren’t What You Think They Are

6 Scallops

Scallops are big chunks of seafood that you can fry up with butter, or stick them in a roll. As for where they come from, well, you might assume that you’re gobbling up an entire seafaring organism, just like when you eat clams or shrimps. If you think about it a little more, that doesn’t make sense, because you’re eating one big cylinder of flesh, with no room for all the organs that any animals needs to have. 

Scallops are animals, but the food item that we call a “scallop” is just one part of them. It’s the adductor muscle. The below image shows it as part of the larger animal. You’ll find this same muscle in other types of seafood, such as mussels. 

The reason we don’t eat the whole animal is the rest of it stands a good chance at being full of biotoxins, and you’d rather not end every meal with violent diarrhea. Still, it leaves the name “scallop” misleading. It’s like if the only part of the chicken that we ate was the wing, and we referred to wings as “chickens.”

5 Chicken Tenders

Speaking of chickens, there’s this joke you might have heard about boneless wings — that they’re just nuggets, but they have a fancy name because adults would be too embarrassed to order them otherwise. People make the same joke about chicken tenders. Let’s dispel that fiction right now, because those three chicken snacks are all very different.

Chicken nuggets are made of reconstituted meat. That means a factory takes tiny scraps of chicken meat and shakes them up and sticks them together into solid chunks. This is the same process that creates the McRib, and it means you’re eating a meat product, but you’re not exactly eating a cut of meat.

Boneless wings are pieces of breast meat that have been cooked in sauce, similarly to how we cook wings. That’s because chicken tastes great in sauce, and only an arbitrary quirk in cooking history led us to use wings for that by default. 

As for tenders, this is what tenders are: 

The tender is the pectoralis minor muscle, while the breast is the pectoralis major. If you eat a chicken tender, that’s because someone fried up that specific muscle, not because you’re just dipping any random bit of chicken meat in sweet-and-sour sauce. Unless, of course, you’re just eating a chicken nugget and someone called it a “chicken tender” to deceive you, in which case you must perform a citizen’s arrest. 

4 Cashews

Cashews are nuts, so you might picture them growing in bunches on some kind of underground tendril, like a peanut. Unfortunately, peanuts offer little guidance about nuts in general because peanuts aren’t nuts at all (they’re legumes). As for cashews, they’re nuts, which means each grows as part of a fruit on the cashew tree. If we want to get really technical, the tree is not a “cashew tree” but simply a “cashew,” while the nut should be referred to as a “cashew nut.”

Here's what a cashew nut looks like when attached to the cashew apple:

That’s right — every single nut came with a whole fruit, which got discarded. And if you eat a couple dozen nuts, they threw away a couple dozen fruits to make those, which gives you some idea about the level of resources that went into growing each cashew nut. 

We could eat the cashew apples, along with eating the cashew nuts. But the apples go bad so quickly that it’s not practical to ship or sell them. Maybe we need to tinker with the genes a little to make them last, and our grandkids will all be snacking on juicy cashew apples after every meal. 

3 Kosher Salt

If you buy kosher salt, that’s not salt which is kosher. There’s no such thing as special salt that’s kosher because all salt is kosher — there is no kosher law banning any kind of salt. 

Kosher salt got that name because it’s useful in preparing other food that is kosher. As for what kosher salt is then, well, it’s salt that’s extra coarse. Standard salt is a bunch of tiny cubic crystals, while kosher salt is this:

2 Tuna

How big is a tuna fish?

Some people, looking at that can of a Chicken of the Sea, might think that a tuna is small enough to fit in a can, much like a sardine is. Other people would laugh at such ignorance. “I’ve eaten tuna steak,” they might say. “Obviously tuna is bigger than that. You’d need both hands to hold a tuna fish.”

Now bask in the glory of just how big tuna really are: 

The 9-foot fish in that video is especially large, but it’s not record-breaking. That video is remarkable because she’s reeling it in solo and because a camera crew happened to be there, not because the fish is impossible in size. That particular fisherman, Michelle Bancewicz, had caught bigger ones before, and Atlantic bluefin tuna in general can reach 13 feet and 2,000 pounds. 

There are species of whale that never grow that big. Species of small whales, but still. 

1 Caviar

Caviar, of course, are fish eggs. So, you might picture a handful of these stuck in some sort of egg chamber inside a fish, who can lay them then go about its day. 

Now, take a look at a sturgeon being sliced open to reveal just how full of caviar it really is:

Damn. You wouldn’t think that anything that you scoop out of a fish in such quantities would be expensive. At least meat (taken from, say, tuna) is sliced from a fish. Caviar is shoveled out. It looks like they’re removing some contaminant, a sludge that transformed all the fish’s organs to goo.  

Caviar remains expensive. Even though each beluga, which can be larger than the one pictured here, perhaps measuring 20 feet, is full of the stuff, it takes that beluga decades to reach such a stage in its life. But there could be a way forward to harvest those eggs more easily. We might be able to switch to getting the caviar out without killing the fish, which means it’ll be able to produce even more eggs, every year or so. Caviar would then cost much less to produce.

Along with those cashew apples, maybe your grandkids will be spreading beluga caviar on crackers whenever they’re hungry. 

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