Meet the balls formerly known as meatballs — theguardian.com

Anyone for a bowl of spaghetti and balls? Or how about a hot ball sub? Didn’t think so. It’s only when a vague but surprisingly comforting word such as “meat”’ is cleaved from the food it prefixes that we realise how suspect a mere “ball” can be. Nevertheless, this is what a food giant in Finland has decided to do. The wholesaler Kesko has renamed its meatballs “pyöryköitä” online, which translates in English, simply and unforgettably, as balls. According to Finnish news service YLE, the decision was made as the balls contain “only machine-recovered meat, essentially scraps”, which though constituting meat in the US, is not defined as such in Finnish or indeed British law. So can you expect a supermarket near you to soon be stocking pink slime nuggets and 75% pork digits, formerly known as sausages? Or better still, a future in which the names ascribed to your food actually match their contents?

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