‘War on Christmas’ expands to ‘war on cannibal sandwich’ in Wisconsin

Forget the war on Christmas; now the nanny statists have taken aim at another storied holiday tradition (at least if you live in Wisconsin): cannibalism.

OK, wait, that’s not quite accurate (though it is a heck of lede). It’s actually the “cannibal sandwich” that has caught the all-seeing eye of Big Government — and it doesn’t like what it’s seeing.

First, some background, for those folks who live in normal places and eat normal food — or those who are having visions of the wood-chipper scene in “Fargo” (which wasn’t even set in Wisconsin, by the way, for you geographically challenged Californians).

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It seems that the “cannibal sandwich” is a popular item in areas of the upper Midwest, and especially in Wisconsin. According to the Associated Press: “The appetizer, also called ‘tiger meat,’ ‘steak tartare’ or simply ‘ground beef,’ is usually a simple dish of lean ground meat seasoned with salt and pepper on rye cocktail bread with sliced raw onion.”

The AP gleaned this tidbit from one John Gurda, a “Milwaukee historian … who served it at his 1977 wedding reception” (which must’ve been one of the highlights of the season that year in Milwaukee). Oh, yes, and in case you were planning on making this at home: “Occasionally, a raw egg will be mixed with the meat.”

Or, I suppose, you could throw caution completely to the winds and slap on a raw oyster or two.

But it’s yummy, at least to Wisconsinites. As Keith Meyer, who runs a butcher shop in Kenosha, explained to the AP: “It’s like eating a cold hamburger that’s a little on the raw side.”

Or, I’d say, it’s exactly like eating a cold hamburger that is in fact raw — then again, I’ve never had one, so what would I know?

Anyway, as I started to say when I began this rant, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (a.k.a. one of the nanny staters) doesn’t have the same, ahem, respect for tradition as the common cheeseheads, and it issued a warning this week about the Wisconsin fare. Seems it had found 50 cases of food-borne illness in 1972, 1978 and 1994 in the state, and in the 2012 holiday season, it linked at least four and possibly more than a dozen cases of E. Coli to the consumption of “cannibal sandwiches” in central Wisconsin.

To which I say: Only 50? Only four? Heck, more people get sick eating bad cantaloupes and spinach. You’re going to deprive the good people of the upper Midwest a cherished holiday party platter because a few folks got really sick?

No, I say! Rather, “Don’t tread on my bread!” Or, “You can have my cold raw hamburger sandwich when you pry it from my cold dead fingers.” I say, “If it was good enough for Grandpa Ollie, it’s good enough for (anyone silly enough to eat it)!”

Or, at the very least, just give it a better name. After all, in California, we pay big bucks to eat sushi — raw fish. So maybe the Wisconsin folks should call their concoction a “sashi sandwich.”

Who knows, it might be the next big thing on the Left Coast.

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