Looking at the food served in Asian cultures has shown me just how far from “home-grown” my diet truly is. In Thai (and Vietnamese) cultures they will sometimes have a large bowl of miscellaneous greens as part of the meal. Thin leaves, fat leaves, big and small, bitter and bland. They could have been plucked from the side of the road and I wouldn’t know the difference. Mushrooms are another food that escapes me – all sorts of different shapes and colors and textures.
Coming to China just ups the ante. I ordered lunch at a place where you select ingredients from a salad-bar-type set-up and they mix it all together and cook it for you in the back. I recognized maybe half of the options, only a handful of which appealed to me.
But moving from plants to animals is where things really get touchy. Fried chicken in the US comes in shapeless crispy batter-covered pieces. At the Yu Garden street markets in Shanghai, tiny birds are submerged in oil and served still intact – beaks and all. In Maine, grocery stores have tanks of live crabs and lobsters to take home and eat. In Pudong, there are tiny turtles and toads bigger than your fist.
Instead of the usual chicken, pork, or beef when ordering a dish at a restaurant, your choices are
expanded to include options like ox tripe, eel, and octopus. For the adventurous, there are fried honey bees, scorpion, and even live “drunken” shrimp swimming in wine.
In America, food is processed and shrink-wrapped in pretty packages kept at controlled temperatures. In an Asian open-air market, you can select from several squalking chickens, or ask the butcher for just the right cut of pork off the slabs on display under the fans keeping the flies away. Blood and guts aren’t Hollywood special effects creations used to get an R-rating, they’re in a bucket next to the counter, or used for delicacies like blood pudding or the tripe mentioned above. Death is so much more real. And maybe that’s really what it comes down to in the end. We don’t like to think about the messy parts of life, and about what people have been driven to try. Or maybe that’s my own interpretation. I’d like to think the situation was desperate when the first person decided to make a meal out of chicken feet or pull a frog out of the mud. But it may just be my own lack of imagination – too conditioned to think of larvae as gross and baby turtles as cute pets.
Coming to China just ups the ante. I ordered lunch at a place where you select ingredients from a salad-bar-type set-up and they mix it all together and cook it for you in the back. I recognized maybe half of the options, only a handful of which appealed to me.
But moving from plants to animals is where things really get touchy. Fried chicken in the US comes in shapeless crispy batter-covered pieces. At the Yu Garden street markets in Shanghai, tiny birds are submerged in oil and served still intact – beaks and all. In Maine, grocery stores have tanks of live crabs and lobsters to take home and eat. In Pudong, there are tiny turtles and toads bigger than your fist.
expanded to include options like ox tripe, eel, and octopus. For the adventurous, there are fried honey bees, scorpion, and even live “drunken” shrimp swimming in wine.
In America, food is processed and shrink-wrapped in pretty packages kept at controlled temperatures. In an Asian open-air market, you can select from several squalking chickens, or ask the butcher for just the right cut of pork off the slabs on display under the fans keeping the flies away. Blood and guts aren’t Hollywood special effects creations used to get an R-rating, they’re in a bucket next to the counter, or used for delicacies like blood pudding or the tripe mentioned above. Death is so much more real. And maybe that’s really what it comes down to in the end. We don’t like to think about the messy parts of life, and about what people have been driven to try. Or maybe that’s my own interpretation. I’d like to think the situation was desperate when the first person decided to make a meal out of chicken feet or pull a frog out of the mud. But it may just be my own lack of imagination – too conditioned to think of larvae as gross and baby turtles as cute pets.
No comments:
Post a Comment