The Lemon Fool

Idly 'walking' around a Belgian town on StreetView I found this restaurant: Sam Suffit

https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@50.30334 ... 312!8i6656
Looking at the canopies at the top, I recognise moules (mussels) and grillades (grills) but...Pica Pica??
That's bloomin' magpies. Do they really eat corvids?

yes, it's a bad day at work. Again.

According to Wikipedia:

Pica (/ˈpaɪkə/ PIE-kuh) is a psychological disorder characterized by an appetite for substances that are largely non-nutritive. The substance may be biological such as hair (trichophagia) or feces (coprophagia), natural such as ice (pagophagia) or dirt (geophagia), and otherwise chemical or manmade

Think I'd give that restaurant a miss, actually.

BJ

So it's either magpies or 'dirt'...

bungeejumper wrote:According to Wikipedia:

Pica (/ˈpaɪkə/ PIE-kuh) is a psychological disorder characterized by an appetite for substances that are largely non-nutritive. The substance may be biological such as hair (trichophagia) or feces (coprophagia), natural such as ice (pagophagia) or dirt (geophagia), and otherwise chemical or manmade

Think I'd give that restaurant a miss, actually.

There is a word for eating feces? Is it a sufficiently popular activity to deserve its own term?

I will tell my wife. She can save some time next time she yells at me to "wipe that shyte-eating grin off your face".

Not sure the country known for fries and chocolate can warrant use of the word "diet". But the french fry museum in Bruges is a worth a visit if you are ever there.

Lootman wrote:Not sure the country known for fries and chocolate can warrant use of the word "diet". But the french fry museum in Bruges is a worth a visit if you are ever there.

I once had a light lunch in Brussels while being schmoozed by a senior European Commission type. A couple of seafood salads, some bread rolls and a bottle of dry white topped 500 euros, so thank goodness I wasn't paying. And that was 15 years ago. I try hard to be a good pro-European, but now I realise why Nigel Farage couldn't get by on thirty five grand a month.

I'd rather have been wolfing frites and mayonnaise in Bruges. Or Ostend, actually.

BJ

I initially imagined this would be some bastardisation of piquante (spicy), but from a brief investigation on a search engine it appears that "pica pica" is a recipe or style of food hailing from South America (Venezuela, Dominican Republic etc) https://duckduckgo.com/?q=pica+pica+rec ... fnt&ia=web [other search engines are available] though what it's doing in Erquelinnes is beyond me.

Oh, and PS - https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0105308/

@BJ - I used to stay in Brussels occasionally and the food wasn't badly priced in the places we went to (which were not downmarket)
Trouble was most stuff was heavy on the meat, and vegetables seemed to be a 'garnish' rather than >50% of the meal
You'd get a big sweaty ham hock or similar and a solitary new potato on the side. Plus, when I asked for my lamb chops medium they came back near enough raw. Perhaps I ordered in French from a Flem, or in Dutch from a Walloony. More likely the former, as I don't speak Dutch unless very drunk

GrahamPlatt wrote:I initially imagined this would be some bastardisation of piquante (spicy), but from a brief investigation on a search engine it appears that "pica pica" is a recipe or style of food hailing from South America (Venezuela, Dominican Republic etc) https://duckduckgo.com/?q=pica+pica+rec ... fnt&ia=web [other search engines are available] though what it's doing in Erquelinnes is beyond me.

Oh, and PS - https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0105308/

I thought it may be some sort of black and white dish, perhaps with feathers sticking out
I'll have to check out that film as part of my culinary investigations

while being schmoozed by a senior European Commission type

BJ - if you hang out with the Prince of Darkness - par for the course.

T7

ps what was the label on the white wine?

Lootman wrote:.....
There is a word for eating feces? Is it a sufficiently popular activity to deserve its own term?....

I don't know how common it is amongst our species, although little surprises me these days, but in the insect world it is huge. Coprophages. Think 'dung beetles'.

And rabbits too...they eat their own to extract extra nutrition they missed the first time
This is possibly off topic for a discussion re Belgian restaurant menus, but I'm not bothered

AleisterCrowley wrote:And rabbits too...they eat their own to extract extra nutrition they missed the first time
This is possibly off topic for a discussion re Belgian restaurant menus, but I'm not bothered

Gorillas too. Particularly revolting to watch bearing in mind the DNA we share.

At least they are (mostly) herbivores

Leothebear wrote:

AleisterCrowley wrote:And rabbits too...they eat their own to extract extra nutrition they missed the first time
This is possibly off topic for a discussion re Belgian restaurant menus, but I'm not bothered

Gorillas too. Particularly revolting to watch bearing in mind the DNA we share.

c.f. a human baby and the contents of its nappy. You've had it trained out of you!

Adult humans may not usually eat what others have excreted (with exceptions), but many will pay good money to wear it - and often stink a place out. Though for some inexplicable reason, abominations like perfumes and aftershaves don't advertise what they're made from and what you're being invited to smell of.

As for DNA, of course there's far more variation within humans than between an average human and a gorilla. Or indeed a rabbit.

UncleEbenezer wrote:As for DNA, of course there's far more variation within humans than between an average human and a gorilla

I get your point... but back in the day the rules of thumb were:
Humans share 98% DNA with gorillas
99% with chimps
and all the variation within the human species is in the last 0.5%
or at least that's what was drilled in to us a reason not to give up on the convergence of a Genetic Algorithm fitting a cost function: small changes can have very radical effect on phenotype.

-sd

I found rook on the menu in England once.

bluedonkey wrote:I found rook on the menu in England once.

Never mind rooks, did we used to eat blackbirds?

Like four and twenty, baked in a pie?

Mike4 wrote:

bluedonkey wrote:I found rook on the menu in England once.

Never mind rooks, did we used to eat blackbirds?

Like four and twenty, baked in a pie?

If Heston1 is to be believed; they weren't cooked.
They were a big avian garnish.

- sd

1: Heston Blumenthal
- a bit of a cook who stacks like this:

servodude wrote:

UncleEbenezer wrote:As for DNA, of course there's far more variation within humans than between an average human and a gorilla

I get your point... but back in the day the rules of thumb were:
Humans share 98% DNA with gorillas
99% with chimps
and all the variation within the human species is in the last 0.5%
or at least that's what was drilled in to us a reason not to give up on the convergence of a Genetic Algorithm fitting a cost function: small changes can have very radical effect on phenotype.

-sd

Nice piece of deviation ! from Belgian Diet to fitting a cost function and bordering on chaos theory.

I started a new thread viewtopic.php?f=83&t=29337 since it’s not quite on-topic here.