Sickness and Strange Appetites
While the coronavirus knocks on the door of the United States and other western nations, China recently took a major step in preventing the next pandemic.
Banning the consumption of wild animals.
The National People’s Congress Standing Committee approved a permanent nationwide ban on not only the consumption but the illegal trade of wild creatures — from pangolins to bats to Komodo dragons — an industry with an estimated worth of $74 billion worldwide.
China temporarily suspended the consumption and sale of wild animals in late January, an attempt to stem the spread of the virus believed to have originated at a market in the city of Wuhan, where civets, bats and pangolins were on the menu.
Many of the animals sold in Wuhan, it turns out, were endangered species, already banned for consumption by Chinese law, so time will tell whether this most recent law will have any effect on the appetites of rural Chinese.
Indeed, the lesson in all of this, it seems to be, is that the world is a place with some mighty strange appetites, with one culture pointing the finger at the next for the consumption of what it considers to be gross or inedible.
How many tequila novices have turned their nose up at a shot when they see the worm lurking at the bottom of the bottle?
For years, I wandered Southeast Asia as a journalist and have been in too many markets where I winced at what I saw sitting in cages, whether it was cowering dogs in Korea or monkeys tied to stakes in a riotous wild-animal market in Jakarta.
These scenes simply upset my sensibilities of what is just and what is not.
Because I was raised in a nation where folks are known to be finicky about their food. The joke among vegans goes that they don’t eat anything with a face. We prefer to eat our chickens with the heads already cut off and turn our heads when we spot the entire bodies of roasted ducks hanging in some Asian market.
We don’t even like bones in our fish (Make that filleted, please), let alone the heads and glassy eyeballs that are common on most plates worldwide.
I remember the first time I walked into a Chinese grocery store in Monterrey Park, outside Los Angeles, years ago, and saw how the customers chose that evening’s dinner from fish that swam in large tanks. Then the attendant took the flopping fish and beat it over the head with a mallet, scaling the creature as it continued to flop on the cutting board.
An act of cruelty? Maybe, but what about our own multi-billion-dollar beef industry where hapless animals are stun-gunned with a bolt to the brain, the sick who can no longer walk often dragged to the butcher’s block.
I guess that’s OK for most of us, as long as we don’t have to see it.
Many Americans want to believe that their meat comes from the grocery store, period.
Americans are meat-eaters, and we love our chicken, consuming some 22 million of the clucking creatures every single day. Well, you might not want to hear this, but the chicken is considered to be the dirtiest animal on the planet, worse than pigs, even.
Given a choice, pigs prefer not to defecate where they eat and sleep, but the chicken makes no such distinctions, and have been known to even peck at their poop.
And yet, go anywhere in the world, eating snake in Africa, or bush meat in the Congo, for example, and the locals try to make us feel better while dismissing the strangeness of the dish, by saying, “Tastes like chicken.”
Chicken McNuggets, anyone?
My point is that the western world has little right to point a righteous finger at the things other countries eat.
Rather, education is key.
Some eating habits are ingrained in a nation’s culture. In southern Italy, when relatives piled formaggio con i vermi (worm-cured cheese) as well as horse meat and calve’s brains, I shoveled it down, at the risk of offending people who were only trying to please me by offering what they consider delicacies.
And yet eating habits in Asia are an entirely different animal.
In Korea, while doing a story on the consumption of dogs, I passed on trying the dog soup served up at restaurants twice a year. I also did not partake of the blowfish dinner in Tokyo, passing on a dish that has poisoned unlucky patrons.
Did I judge? I tried not to.
Part of the disconnect is that we westerners tend to anthropomorphize our animals. A young deer is Bambi. Bears are named Smokey. Dogs are Fido, not food. When I did a story on a restaurant in Beijing that serves only animal penises, I passed, thank you.
I am no Anthony Bourdain.
Once, at a restaurant in southern China, I debated a fellow diner over what’s on the dinner menu in the Middle Kingdom. I realized China has in the past been very poor, and that many rural regions remain so, and so I can understand why some people eat things that would turn stomachs elsewhere.
The most abhorrent is monkey brains, where the animal is fed alcohol (for taste, rather than lessening its pain) before it is clubbed, its brains consumed with spoons right there at the table.
Many consider this an urban legend, that no culture would stoop so low in its cuisine, but some Chinese say they have tried the dish, but I have never witnessed it.
The woman would have none of my argument about poverty as a reason for her nation’s strangely-varied menu.
“We’re just more imaginative than you people in the West,” she said.
We agreed to disagree.
But what I object to is the obsession of some Asian cultures to kill wild animals for their perceived medicinal qualities. Believing that bear bile, tiger bones, rhino horns pangolin scales or dried seahorse is the cure for what ails you is contributing to mass wild-animal extinction around the planet.
The coronavirus is a reminder of the work left to be done.