The humble anchovy.  Browsing our image library I was expecting to find the standard scientific image (above). What I was not expecting to find was this bizarre second image:

Lo and behold, food photography from Australia’s national science agency. It’s true these little guys look totally unappetising and actually on close inspection the picture itself looks like a scanned image from a magazine cut-out… but still, we tried.

I could pretend that on hearing the word anchovy I immediately recall that they are common salt-water forage fish, that they are found in the Atlantic, Indian and Pacific Oceans (south-east Australia for the Australian anchovy) and that they are particularly abundant in the Mediterranean.

But that would be fibbing.

When I hear the word anchovy, I think of this:

Or this:

I could go on… but this isn’t a food blog. And anyway, it’s lunchtime.