The Snoek

A cartoon in the Evening News showed a London family preparing with bated breath to open a can of fish. "Steady now, mother," says the paterfamilias, standing by with an ax; "if it springs at you, I slosh it with this ax."

The can was one of ten million on their way from South Africa last week to relieve the monotony of the British diet. They were filled with snoek (rhymes with cook). "I've never met a snoek face to face," said Food Minister John Strachey, announcing the purchase, "so I can't tell you much about it except that it's four feet long and slender." But the dictionary defined snoek as a form of barracuda, and Strachey's press conference broke up under the firm impression that snoek was a maritime menace. A Daily Mail headline promptly labeled the snoek as the "Tiger of the Seas."

An alert reporter, however, discovered that in Australia the snoek is called barra-couta. He raced to a natural history museum. Ah, yes, said a learned authority there, the South African snoek (not to be confused with the basslike Gulf of Mexico snook or robalo) is indeed a barra-couta, a cousin of the mild-mannered mackerel and no relation to the barbarous barracuda.

Confronted with this ichthyological news, a Food Ministry press relations officer croaked: "Oh, my God!" and promised to call back. "Well, at least," he reported gloomily several hours later, "the Food Minister had never actually called a snoek a barracuda."

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