Eating habits in the civilized world tend to be about the same with the exception of about a billion who eat bugs as a protein source. That’s as far from ‘safe food’ as China is from a clean atmosphere.
By the time we get it, it’s homogenized, packaged and probably flash frozen with a beautiful picture on the box. Forget about what the food actually looks like, it’s not an exact copy of the contents, but a representation of what the most appetizing ‘look’ the food stylists can get for the camera. That way we can look at it and not get the feeling that when it was alive it could have crawled into our tent, causing us to jump and scream at 95 decibels. Speaking of which…..
I received an email entitled ‘Beijing Fast food’ and came across such ‘dis-comfort’ foods as goat lungs with red peppers, dung beetles, and silk worms with turkey vulture schnitzel. The pictures alone would send any sane person into vegan mode.Turkey vulture schnitzel! If this is what we could call ‘fast food’ I’m coming in for a screeching halt on the runway of bad taste. This will kill the dish of schnitzel for me even if served by the Uma Thurman character in ‘The producers’ while singing ‘Falling in Love Again’ as it’s being served after my third stein of beer.
To eat that you have to be as hungry as when you choose a “Hot Pocket’ at the Seven-Eleven after a night of heavy drinking. So who would eat this stuff?
The cable show ‘Bizarre foods’ host Andrew Zimmern would. He’s a man with a stomach of iron and the taste-buds of a person marooned on a desert island eating left-overs from a wagon train meal cooked up by a dirt encrusted Gabby Hayes, that’s who. Zimmern travels far and wide to eat ‘exotic’ foods and prove he can live. He got out of the rat race only to wind up eating them.
In the email was a picture of huge BBQ’d rodents with an overbite that would make the late Freddie Mercury jealous. I hadn’t seen jaws like that since the raptors from Jurassic Park tried to eat Wayne Knight, the fat postman from ‘Seinfeld’. I’m sure there’s a ‘Friends of Animals’ dental practice somewhere in the hinterlands with a waiting room that’s perennially empty.
Based on the Beijing fast food I saw, the great wall should have been constructed to keep eating habits contained. If there’s a branch of the ASPCA it’s got to be the loneliest job in the world. At least we grind our beef into a patty instead of having to look it in the eye and hoping it’s done well enough to not wink back.
PETA would have their hands full, and not with the ‘special of the day.’
And speaking of Moo Goo Gai Cicada, I’m happy that General Tso liked chicken and not sea urchins. I’ll have a number 6 please, and hold the crickets.
