Colbert on DiGiorno “Wyngz”

Posted By elissa on Feb 4, 2011 | 2 comments

Ordinarily, I wouldn’t do two back-to-back Stephen Colbert postings, but this one – via Consumer Reports (CR), no less – was irresistible.

Here’s CR on the topic:

Leave it to Stephen Colbert to discover that “Boneless Wyngz” is not some crazy misspelling but a government-mandated way to describe food that looks like chicken wings but contains no actual wing meat.

…Colbert goes on to say that wyngz is a “government-mandated way to get around the fact that it’s not real wing meat.” And sure enough, there it was on the website of the USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service. “The FSIS allows the use of the term ‘wyngz’ to denote a product that is in the shape of a wing or a bite-size appetizer type product under the following conditions.” Some of those conditions include: The poultry used is white chicken, the product does not contain any wing meat, and the FSIS stipulates that “no other misspellings are permitted.”

The use of these faux spellings on food products has always driven me nuts. Whenever I see an unconventional spelling for something (like “creme” vs. cream, for example), I know, without even looking at the ingredients, that it’s a fake in some way. But I wouldn’t have guessed that the government was behind this particular one. Nice catch by Colbert.