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Vice Blog

London - Gross Jar Update

With the recent hot weather, the streets of Dalston have been engulfed in the smell of rotting flesh left out by butchers in Ridley Road market. Without adequate refrigeration, the meat and fish has been festering into maggot-infested pulp. It's been such a problem that Hackney council have warned market traders who leave meat out overnight that they will be taken to court. One council spokesman held a handkerchief over his face and said: "this is particularly unpleasant in hot weather".

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We decided this was a good opportunity to find a new addition for our Gross Jar, so we headed straight down to the meat market to find the most gut-wrenching piece of half-rotted meat possible. At first we went around the various meat stalls enquiring about getting hold of sheep's eyeballs and some cow dick, but strangely the butchers weren't very helpful. After a while, we found a lovely elderly, rotten-toothed Arabic butcher who was willing to give us the perfect resident for our jar – an ox's tongue, still attached to some cheek meat. We grabbed it off him quicker than you can say "ohmyGodI'mgonnapuke" and hurried back to the office to mate it with the rotten pig's foot that's currently giving off a smell reminiscent of the toilets on day four of Glastonbury, mixed with the killing fields of Rwanda, three weeks after the Tutsis slaughtered the Hutus.

Our intern Jack seemed a little bit too keen to get familiar with the tongue, so we brought the couple up to the roof of The Old Blue Last (where the Gross Jar now lives) to see if he'd like to French kiss the tongue before it was given its new home. Jack was more than up to the task – licking and biting the putrid meat before tossing it in the jar. The Gross Jar now basks in the sun beaming down upon the roof of The Old Blue Last, patiently awaiting its next addition.

Email us at info@viceuk.com with suggestions on how to improve the Gross Jar. The best suggestion / ability to hook us up with the ingredients will win a year's free subscription to the magazine.