Cats and dogs on the menuA wise Western traveler in China avoids asking one question at all costs: "What am I eating?" Unless you have food allergies or other dietary restrictions, it’s just not a question you really want an answer to sometimes. Especially if someone has said, "Come on, you have to at least try it!" Chinese exotic food includes scorpions, silk worms, innards, fish, prawn and duck heads and jellied pig blood, not to mention horse, frog, rabbit and even the occasional dog. Westerners find much of this food, in a word, icky.
But, though it’s true that the Chinese eat quite a wide variety of things we wouldn’t consider edible in the West, most Chinese dishes don’t contain anything "weird". The staple meats are beef, pork, chicken and mutton, and generally speaking they’re cooked sans innards and avec fresh vegetables perfectly familiar to the Western palate. If you truly have an aversion to the idea of eating intestines, you’ll no more starve in China than you would anywhere else. Explaining your aversion to the Chinese might cause some initial confusion though. To them, intestines are just as much food as flank steak, so why would you eat one but not the other? But once you do make yourself understood, avoiding the "weird" food isn’t a problem.
Some people seek to offer an explanation for why the Chinese eat such a wide variety of dishes and animal parts. During times of famine and scarcity, deforestation led to scarcity of wood led to the invention of bone chopsticks in place of larger wooden utensils and made it necessary to cut food into very small pieces so it could be cooked very. Stir-frying and chopsticks became signature parts of the Chinese food experience. The idea is that these same factors led people to get creative with food. Things that otherwise might have been discarded and still are discarded in other culinary traditions, such as innards, animal blood, and vegetable peels, became important parts of Chinese cuisine (1). There may be something to the theory, but it’s also true that there have been famines in every part of the world, and not everyone eats cow’s bronchial tubes or makes soup out of chicken feet.
"Why do Chinese people eat what they eat?" is a question that may not have an answer. Nor is that the only question that doesn’t have an answer. Why is eating scorpions so much weirder than eating prawns? Why is octopus so much ickier than calamari? Why is rabbit sort of OK, but rats definitely aren’t? They’re both rodents after all. Why eat heavily processed fast food that’s well proven to be deeply unhealthy and not highly nutritious fresh animal blood? What makes certain foods "weird"?
Technorati Tags: