Ordinary Gweilo

An interesting piece in The Guardian about what people in China will eat. Note that in Hong Kong it is illegal to eat cats, dogs and most wild animals, and there are still restrictions in force in the PRC from the SARS outbreak.

I find it quite interesting what is deemed acceptable to eat in different countries – when I first went to France, for example, I was unsure about eating horse, frogs legs and snails, all of which seemed quite strange to someone brought up in the UK. Having tried all of them, I can say that I wouldn’t go out of my way to either eat, or avoid eating, any of them. In the North of England, sheep stomach is something of a delicacy for some people, and in France, veal sweetbreads (thymus glands) are popular.

If you eat animals I can’t see why horses should be any different to cows, sheep or pigs. Ostrich and kangaroo meat is relatively common these days, and my wife rather surprised me by refusing to eat ostrich cheung fan. You can argue about which animals are more intelligent or more cuddly, I suppose, but if you start doing this I reckon you’d end up as a vegetarian and not eat any of them.

It is perhaps a bit more understandable to worry about eating creatures that you feel squeamish about, but again this a fine line to draw. To many people it makes a difference what you can see on the plate, and for example frogs legs look like any other meat (and taste quite like chicken).

Presumably the objection to eating cats and dogs arises from the fact that people keep them as pets. However, some people have rabbits as pets and yet we eat them – there’s quite a funny scene in “Local Hero” where one of the characters gets his pet rabbit served up in a pie and only finds out after he has eaten it. Pigeons are also kept by some people (mainly for racing) and eaten as well in most countries, and I’m sure there are other examples.

Eating snake seems to upset some people, but I don’t have a problem with that. In fact I probably worry more about how awkward things are to eat, and I’m afraid I don’t have the Chinese ability to put something like a chicken foot in my mouth and then spit out the bone, skin, etc. When I had snake it was free of bones and so I had no problem eating it.

I do have concerns about some of the wild animals that are eaten in China, all the more so after the outbreak of SARS. Mind you, the BSE problem in the UK was also quite scary, and although scientists don’t seem quite sure what happened, it was clearly not a good idea to serve sheep brains to cows.