Dancing Squid about to Get Eaten

As an Asian, let me be the first to acknowledge that Asians are crazy. Well, at least our taste in weird food is.

Lol Alex.
I just don't understand what the fascination is with something like that. That wouldn't make me hungry. It would do quite the opposite actually. BLEH. Just weird.
I love squid, but it better not be moving any longer when it comes out to me.

This is really, really horrible and should be taken down.

Yes, redheadartgirl, I'm with you. Why should we be subjected to reading an entire summary describing what we'll see if we watch the video, then be forced to press play and sit through the whole thing?

Never again do I wish to be subjected to knowledge of the physical world and cultures different from my own.

OH! THE OCTOPUSSANITY!

Next on Neatorama: video of a really adorable beheaded dog corpse twitching and spasming while being roasted over a fire.

OHJESUS! That would so stop me right there. Creepy as hell. I though ti meant like minor contractions, not a dead animal doing the watusi. Jesus H Christ on a sidecar! *shudder*

Dip in batter and fry it, first!
Raw squid sounds kind of chewy.

if i poured acid over your feet and filmed your panic, would that be considered "dancing"? this is animal cruelty on several levels, nothing neat about it, and calling it culinary culture does not make it any better.

ok, i admit, i skipped reading the part about the squid being dead. i guess that changes something. still, not my kind of "neat".

As gross as it is, the reason people eat a moving squid is to insure its freshness. This looks like an end-run around that purpose, while keeping the grossness.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M90BO-KFyQk

"ok, i admit, i skipped reading the part about the squid being dead. i guess that changes something. still, not my kind of "neat"."

No the animal is not dead, and it looks like an octopus. Either way, the brain and most of the body are still right there.

The animal is still alive, it was cut in half and then tortured with what looks like soy sauce. That means mostly salt, literally pouring salt on and in a body cut in half. It is very sick, nearly dead, and probably suffocating because it has been out of water for a long while. Only the extreme pain of the salt is enough to make it try one last time to get away. By the time the salt it poured into the stump where it's body was cut in half, it looks like it ran out of energy.

Good times...

Dead or not, enjoying watching your animal-food writhe is kind of odd...but as a lifelong meat eater I can't really make any judgements about it...whatever floats your boat

What I always find interesting is the divide in comments on some videos on Neatorama. Don't like it? Skip past it. I found it a bit disgusting but fascinating nonetheless.

They /could/ have posted the video of a live squid being eaten which does happen sometimes.

Also, @ Arturo, that's pretty extreme, man.

I'm pretty sure its brain is still there... If you steel yourself and watch the other videos on the subject you can watch the kill process and you'll see that there seem to be three steps -- slitting open the tail and yanking out the body (ie. skinning it I suppose), then cutting off the bone (or whatever the name of what's inside the tail is) which leaves the head and arms writhing, and then cutting off legs and eating them after a bit of torture.

It looks to me like this video is in the middle stage, where the brain and head are still attached to the legs. After what you see in this video, the legs would then be cut off the head and eaten if it's like the other videos on the subject.

Leaving aside all moral commentary, I'm quite certain that this is an animal with a brain, writhing in massive pain, not just a nerve firing trick on braindead tissue. I ate a single live shrimp once at a Korean restaurant, with the tail cut off to be eaten while the twitching legs and head "watched" the horror. It was extremely upsetting... There's no way I could have handled the above.

Not that the horrors that we do on factory farms here and meat processing plants are any better. If people were forced to watch what got the meat to the table and understood the nightmare the animals went through, I suspect vegetarianism would be much more commonplace!

And as a PS., it does look like you can see the squid's eyes in this video, which gives evidence to the theory that the brain is still in place. That said, I will accept that the motion may well be involuntary even if the brain can sense it all. There are some analogous nightmare fuel videos of "dancing" frogs legs.

@cam - no, one should NOT "skip past it". should people "skip" by you if you were being tortured, harassed, mugged, attacked, wounded, killed, endangered, harmed in any way? animal cruelty is - and never will be - "neat", and your morbid fascination is not shared by all of us. skipping past, and thereby ignoring it, can hardly be justified.

"Hello! ma baby
Hello! ma honey
Hello! ma ragtime gal"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=apbjUvROsaU&feature=

I can imagine many commenters here must imagine all the writhing pain of all the meat before they eat them, while cowardly delegate the job of the executioner to the chefs and the butchers. Every piece of sushi, every piece of filet mignon and every piece of chicken nugget is the result of the constant screaming of muscles and cells being sheared and torn - an afterlife battle for the unity of their bodies! Oh, the horror.

And if one is a vegetarian because of that, then I'd just say that one is just an Animalist - he doesn't eat animals because he can relate to them, but he eat vegetables because he can't relate to the pain of every plant cells when his teeth crawl through them and shredding every single piece of nuclei and cell wall.

Xenophobia at its finest.
Us urbanites have long forgotten what it means to hunt for food!

I can't wait to see what happens to humanity if the first extraterrestrial hyper-intelligent species that visit us are cannibalistic!

Back to topic:
This is pretty neat!

I totally understand wanting it to be fresh, but as I said, it better not be moving still when it reaches my plate.
I'm all for eating meat, but a steak better not still be twitching when I'm pouring on the steak sauce.
Just creepy

Yuck. I shouldn't have watched this around lunchtime.

Not neat.

I am an unabashed carnivore and specist and and even i can see this is sadistic and cruel.

One word...

ewwww

I remember seeing a video of live shrimp being eaten. oooohhhh let me look for it...here...http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jwkccvsj6fc&feature=fvwrel

This animal is dead. The entire mantle (the long part of the body that the fins are attached to) has been cut off. The mantle contains most of the animal's vital organs, including the heart. The "brain," i.e., cerebral ganglia is likely in head part remaining, but won't be getting any oxygen so the animal is dead or is unconscious and on it way to being dead. The fact that brain and parts of the nervous are still present is a red herring in terms of the muscles exhibiting this twitching phenomenon. Completely isolated muscle can do exactly the same thing. Of course isolated muscle is not nearly as cool as many different muscles all attached to a hydrostatic body all twitching.

Here's more info than you'll ever need on squid anatomy:

http://webs.lander.edu/rsfox/invertebrates/lolliguncula.html

Now you can understand how observant Hindus look upon us when consume cows for their meat.

Okay, let's assume it's dead.

Even if so, what's the appeal in eating this? Do you want to be able to fantisise about eating something while it's still alive?!? If so, it's still wrong.

Wrong.

@Sparky: The appeal is that it's fresh and tastes good. Are you saying that it's okay as long as you don't fantasize about the animal still being alive? That doesn't make much sense logically.

As far as the eating the live shrimp that others have mentioned, how is this different from eating live oysters, or live mealworms, etc.? And if the animals die instantly when you bite them, how is that different from using a knife to chop off their little heads or throwing them in pot of boiling water?

Fuck that. It's radioactive....Don't eat it unless you take a sievert reading!!

Next year the same restaurant will offer multi-eyed writhers to stumbling, hairless patrons.