When you order ice cream at Baskin-Robbins, the cute girl with a little bit of acne grabs a scooper from the water-filled trough that holds the other scoopers and she flips open the hinged glass door that provides access to the thirty-one large tubs of ice cream that have names on a paper tag like Miami Ice and Chocolate Fulfill-Mint. These three-gallon tubs are made of cheap cardboard so that they’re easier to lift but they freeze solid and provide decent insulation, and with a little practice an ice cream employee can perfect the technique and soon be rolling out tennis-ball-sized ice cream spheres in all flavors.

When I finally found the booth on the trade show floor one of the first things I noticed, off to the left in an area with microscopes and other medical equipment, was a three-gallon cardboard tub. I thought: Someone’s pretty smart. Ice cream is a good way to get people into the booth.

I nudged a coworker and pointed to the tub. “Hey let’s get a little ice cream.”

“Ice cream? What are you talking about?”

“Baskin-Robbins ice cream comes in those kinds of tubs.”

“You might want to go over there and have a closer look.”

I did. The cardboard lid said three things: PORCINE. CORN. 100. And my colleague blurts out, “Pig eyes!”

“What?”

“Pig eyes—the tub is filled with pig eyes for the wet lab that’s happening in the booth.” (The words on the lid meant, PORCINE = pig, CORN. = corneas, 100 = 100 of them.)

Holy fuck! Pig eye ice cream with a bacon swirl. I saw the entire show up close later in the day. A wet lab is kinda like the combination of science camp and a test drive at an auto dealer. Medical device manufacturers often stage these activities at trade shows and other events to give healthcare professionals the chance to see how new products and new techniques will perform in simulated surgical and clinical settings. These people were gonna use the pig eyes from the ice cream carton to simulate something they would one day be doing to a human eye.

♦

The booth we were in had seats for about ten doctors. Once they were seated and had donned their protective gear, a pig eye (a real eyeball from Porky or one his friends) was plucked from the ice cream tub and placed in a tray in front of them. To avoid the sensation of a cherry tomato shooting off a dinner plate as you’re trying to fork it, the bottom of the trays had barbed spokes to hold the eye in place. Now the physicians are free to experiment. They are handed a number of different devices and they are trying to master some sort of injection technique.

They try and try again, and sometimes a passing proctor in a lab coat offers tips on injection angles and depth and insertion pressure. Overall the impression is akin to having a field day with a piggy pincushion, and a certain amount of liquid, what can only be described as eye juice, sloshes about the trays and seems to be dripping inappropriately. When these ten “test drivers” are done they are replaced by ten others and over the course of three show days the supply of PORCINE. CORN. is almost at zero.

Even in the name of science or commerce, even if someone says it’s a worthwhile use of what was going to be ham anyway, it is a foul business. There’s a persistent odor, the kind that pervades industrial manufacturing plants, and a primal compulsion to wash your hands and even if Baskin-Robbins had the superpowers of Batman and Robin they could never again get me to eat a scoop rolled from one of those oversized cardboard tubs.

The reason I was there at this annual trade gathering of the eye doctors, was to show support for one of our clients and to be an eyewitness to how their products worked so that I could go back and write about them with a depth and passion that would inspire everyone in my path, probably leading to a spike in sales and adulation from a thankful nation.

Now I’m thinking maybe I know too much—about medical science, the money side of healthcare, the callous side of your friendly neighborhood eye doctor, about farm animals and their body parts.