We love our comfort food, and often refuse to experiment.
The majority of us opt for our comfort foods most of the time, and this tendency is natural and normal. Additionally, regardless of what people claim, food habits are constantly evolving. Sometimes politics intervenes to redefine what is acceptable food.
I started my career in Bombay many years ago, and we could buy beef in the open market. We hired a cook and asked him to prepare beef curry for us a few times a week. One of my friends, a Gujarati, loved his beef. But now, in India’s cow belt, people will call for your arrest or lynch you if you mention beef. A few generations from now, Indians living in India’s cow belt will either forget the existence of beef or make an extraordinary effort, such as traveling to Goa, Kerala, or the North-East India, to consume it. I assume, of course, that you don’t wish to travel outside India.
Food customs, like all customs, are not static.
Food habits and customs – like all customs – are not static: they change with time. Also, habit and custom determine what we consider acceptable.
My time in China.
It is now time to take you on a journey to China, where I lived for about six years. The Chinese are more adventurous than the Indians, who are often timid and easily shocked. I discovered that discussing Chinese eating habits was a brilliant, reliable conversation opener. We’d frown, roll – or widen – our eyes, munch fries, and talk about how uncivilized the Chinese people can be, while living in their country and earning money!
I was always the silent hypocrite in the group, joining the criticism, while going out with Chinese colleagues and friends to eat widely! Does this statement mean that I ate everything that the Chinese threw at me? The answer to that question is a resounding ‘no.’
A few months after I moved to China, we had a national conference in Bo Ao, in South China. I sat next to my French boss at lunch, and we pulled out chicken feet from our broth at the same time. The feet with their evil claws dangled from my chopsticks before they plopped back into my broth.
I turned to my Chinese colleagues and said, ‘Ladies and gentlemen. I am prepared to be culturally sensitive and flexible, but there are boundaries, and chicken feet represent one such boundary.’
The Chinese do not eat the chicken claws. Instead, they hold the feet with their chopsticks and delicately nibble at the ankles. I, on the other hand, allowed my vivid and active imagination to go into overdrive, visualizing chicken claws scratching my innards, and always refused the offer, and denied their insistence that the ankles are tasty.
Your culture and upbringing.
Your culture and upbringing determine which foods you consider edible or inedible. A year into my stay, while debating the merits of chicken feet, I suggested to my Chinese brethren that they visit me in Delhi one day, and eat goat’s brains, have goat hoof soup (paya), eat mutton curry, and suck the marrow from the bones.
It was their turn to collapse in shock, telling me that our Indian culinary preferences were disgusting!
The livestock prevalent in a country also affects what you eat and your preferences. We love mutton (goat), which the Chinese – in general – dislike. However, you can get roast mutton in Inner Mongolia or Xinjiang (Western China). I consider the boiled mutton with brown sauce consumed in Inner Mongolia disgusting to the palate, which the Mongolians love, boiled mutton lathered with that unspeakable brown sauce.
I refused to eat the duck’s jaw because I found the exercise pointless – there was hardly any meat in the jaw: you only gnaw on the bone.
The impact of visual appeal.
Visual appeal, or the lack of it, also determines what you eat and how much resistance you feel to eating something. I remember the shock I experienced the first time I ate black chicken soup. A huge bowl lay in the center of the table, with a whole chicken—black–skinned—lying peacefully in the broth. Then dip your chopsticks into the chicken’s flesh, transfer it to your bowl, and add some broth. My Chinese friends assured me the chicken is good for your health. After the initial shock of seeing a black chicken in a huge bowl of broth, I admitted that the flesh and broth were delicious.
Conversations with a dead turtle.
My resistance to turtles lasted almost a year. I remember sitting in a restaurant in Bei Hai, Beijing. The server (they are almost always female) plopped a full turtle on everyone’s plate. They serve it so that the turtle’s head faces you, and I remember carrying on an intense mental conversation with the dead turtle’s soul.
“Will you really eat me?” asked the turtle’s soul.
“Umm,” replied my imagination.
“Please don’t eat me.”
“Won’t I appear rude?”
“No, no. Spare my dead flesh,” insisted the turtle’s soul.
With that, I pushed the turtle away. A year later – again in Beijing – I finally ate a turtle. When I chewed on the delicious flesh, I encountered another culinary barrier: watching one of our visitors pull the shell off the turtle’s back and slurp the gelatinous mass that once bound the shell to the body.
Cruelty.
Hairy Crabs
Perceptions of cruelty have a significant impact on how you perceive food—the Chinese breed’ hairy crabs,’ a great delicacy in Shanghai, Suzhou, etc. Personally, the crab’s meat never much appealed to me. I considered it tasteless. One day, a German friend came over with a few of his Chinese colleagues. We planned to spend the evening drinking beer and eating crab, after cooking them in my kitchen. They put water into the pots, placed the crabs inside, and boiled them for almost 30 minutes until they deemed them fit for consumption. The Chinese assured me that the only reason they slow-cooked the crabs was to release the toxins from the body into the water. Whatever!
I never looked at hairy crabs the same way again.
Drunken Prawns
The Chinese also love to consume ‘drunken prawns.’ Once, in Dalian, one of these drunk prawns began wiggling. The prawn’s wiggling motions mesmerized me. Two women sat on either side, the brawny, tall woman from Beijing on my left, and the petite Shanghainese on my right. The lazy susan table rotated slowly, and the prawn began regaining its full energy until it jumped high in my direction. I yelped and jumped, landing on the petite woman’s lap. The prawn landed on the Beijing girl’s plate. She popped the morsel into her mouth, grinned at me, and said – ‘Ah! Fresh prawn.’
I never looked at the woman the same way again until my behavior a few weeks ago forced me to re-evaluate my earlier assessment of the young lady.
Let’s move on from China.
I can write many essays on food adventures in China, and I have eaten all sorts of food during my time in China, Korea, Japan, the Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam, etc. I have been adventurous with their food, and my willingness to accept their food traditions suggests that I am adventurous and willing to respect them. This openness does not mean that I gained a deep understanding of their food habits and culture.
I learned and adopted the logic of them lifting their bowls of rice or noodles to their faces and eating, or surping them. These practices may seem repellent to many outside the region, but they are practical.
I will now draw a curtain over my time in China, and leave you with the assurance that I have experienced a variety of fare.
Religion, politics, and wokedom.
We live in a woke and increasingly intolerant society that loves labeling and criticizing those who do not fit our established models of what is acceptable food or behavior. I was able to enjoy the food and drink in these countries only because I was willing to experiment and be open to what was available.
Religion and politics also interfere with food habits, and I notice a slight tendency towards hypocrisy in India. This hypocrisy began with Hindus labeling halal as an inhumane practice.
We now refer to the cow as ‘our mother,’ prohibit the slaughter of cows, while remaining the world’s second largest beef exporter, and we also condemn cows to painful deaths when we allow them to munch on plastic found in municipal waste.
Many vegetarians post images of their food on social media, claiming their culinary choice is free from ‘guilt, tears, and cruelty.’ These hypocrites ignore the cruel practices of the dairy industry, or the painful deaths of cows forced to eat plastic on India’s streets.
So long as you don’t put a knife to the cow’s throat, God loves you.
More than 75% of India’s population is non-vegetarian.
I’d like to avoid a lengthy essay and will not delve into a dissertation on food and health. Maybe I will reserve this exploration for another time.
My experience in Ziro, Arunachal Pradesh, India.
When I was in Ziro, I consumed fried grasshoppers, a baby frog, silkworms, and live bee larvae. You see the photographs accompanying this essay.
The Western world is experimenting with insects, and many scientists predict that they will be a significant source of protein in the decades ahead. I first ate insects in China—ants.
Will the world begin consuming insects?
When Westerners speak of insects, they do not refer to deep-fried insects placed on your plate. The ‘Eww Factor,” or “Eww Quotient,” or “E-Quotient” will be too high. Food processing companies will grind the insects into a paste, lather the particles with artificial color, flavor, and sugar, package them well, market them to you, and empty your wallet, while destroying any nutritional value the insect bodies may contain.
Food processing companies and the medical community have an unholy alliance. Eat the food, fall ill, visit a doctor, and buy medicine – the model aims to keep capitalism alive and well!
My family almost disowned me when I sent them photos of what I consumed.
Analysing my experiments in Ziro.
The Chinese trained me well, and after a brief shock, I dove right in. I liked the grasshoppers—they tasted better than packaged chips, and I can picture myself watching a movie with a plate of fried grasshoppers. No one will watch that movie with me!
The frog was not delicious. I held it in my fingers to ensure that the dead frog had no intention of biting my tongue, and then I popped it into my mouth! The silkworms, similarly, did not impress me. While I won’t have a problem eating them again, I probably will not enjoy the taste and may pass on a second helping.
The larvae reminded me of my young Beijing lady who popped that live prawn into my mouth. An Arunachali gentleman assured me that they were full of healthy protein, and the young lady selling the larvae assured me they tasted like butter.
I inspected the larvae with a dubious eye and asked if they would sting my tongue. After the lady promised me my tongue was safe, I put one in my mouth, and gasped, ‘Ohh…’ with surprise!.
They did not taste like butter, but they burst as soon as I bit into them, and the juicy body flooded my mouth with a minty flavor. I definitely do not mind a second helping!
As I type these words and prepare to send this essay out into the world, I understand that many people will want to ostracize me. Many will look at me the way I once looked at the young Beijing girl.
Let’s not kid ourselves.
We fool ourselves when we state, or believe, that we are more civilized than our ancestors. Are we truly more civilized than our ancestors? Consider some of the exotic beauty treatments people undergo: snail mucin treatments, placental cell treatments, bird poop facials, baby foreskin facials, etc. These are becoming common, especially among the rich and famous.
I believe it is sheer hypocrisy to convince yourself that exotic animal products are suitable for your beauty, but you may not put them into your body. I also believe it is sheer hypocrisy to say you can consume a grasshopper protein bar but not the grasshopper itself.
Health must be on your agenda. And, concluding.
Health concerns must be high on your agenda. Genetic experimentations are causing allergies to spread across the world. I had not heard of gluten, dairy, or peanut allergy when I was a teenager. While I admit that awareness affected detection, I also wager that these allergies were not as widespread as they are nowadays.
The other aspect that concerns me is the spread of zoonotic diseases. As our society becomes more accustomed to supplement use, our immunity declines, and we will be more vulnerable to disease in the years ahead.
I’d like to conclude this installment of my food explorations with one piece of advice: do not judge others by your preconceived notions of what is acceptable and what is not. Experiment, respect other cultures and food traditions, without bastardizing them or patronizing them. Permit surprise to be an integral part of your life.