Stephen Colbert's right wyngz rhetoric

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. In his new segment, Thought for Food, Colbert holds up a box of DiGiorno's Pizza & Wyngz and riffs on the company's motto, "It's not delivery it's DiGiorno ... and it's not wings it's wyngz."

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."

As Colbert says, "It's government-approved deliciousness."

Recently, Consumer Reports tested chicken wings made out of real chicken—specifically Buffalo wings that you buy in the supermarket. In our taste tests, Bell & Evans was best overall, although the wings could have been a bit crispier. The other wings that rated very good were T.G.I. Friday's, Perdue and Cafe W (Walgreens).

And although we haven't tested DiGiorno's Pizza & Wyngz, we did include DiGiorno's cheese pizza in our latest pizza tests. Their Rising Crust Four Cheese pie was one of the top three (the others were Amy's Cornmeal Crust 3 Cheese and Home Run Inn's Classic Cheese). And we gave them an A for spelling too.

—MHJF