Related Guides

Most Popular

Travel Resources

ShoulderSeason

Special Issues

Photo Galleries

Screensavers
share this article del.icio.us DIGG Facebook StumbleUpon

From Away.com
Page:
1 2 3 

Gross Me Out (cont.)
Internal organs, sex organs, and blood soup.
Rule Number 4: Internal organs are gross.
Americans may happily munch on calves, thighs, backs, ribs, and the flank of a cow. But brains, tongue, feet, stomach, intestines, and other internal organs are all suspect. This squeamishness, writes anthropologist Jeremy MacClancy in Consuming Culture, may be the result of the social climbing that accompanies the American Dream. In a country where red meat is more expensive, "cooked innards are just what the urban poor want to leave behind when they are given the chance to rise above economic squalor.... For European immigrants on the make, to serve their guests sweetbreads was like waving a culinary banner of poverty and social failure."

If you'd like to set aside your social-climbing snobbery, sample some haggis, a Scottish delicacy made of sheep's stomach stuffed with innards, grains, and spices. It isn't much different from your average sausage, but the fact that it's a stomach makes it nice and creepy.

Rule Number 5: Sex organs are gross.
"Testicles appear on menus under various euphemisms, which prevent the diner from confronting too directly the contents of the plate," writes Alan Davidson in the Oxford Companion to Food. Here in the United States, they often appear under the thoroughly bizarre name of "Rocky Mountain Oysters." In her book Chili Death, mystery writer Susan Susan Wittig Albert offers the following advice with her recipe for Mountain Oyster Chili: "If you suspect your guests of being squeamish, don't tell them what's in this dish. The less they know, the better they'll like it. Serves four."
The worms arrived, served in a spicy sauce. They didn't really taste like anything. The texture was sort of like shrimp with the casing on: crunch, then squish.

Rule Number 6: Blood is gross.
"Of all the component parts of an animal, [blood is] the one which is most apt to engender the kinds of emotions which underlie, or accompany, food taboos," says the Oxford Companion to Food. Grossed-out Americans are in good company here, as the Old Testament and the Koran forbid ingesting blood. However, many cultures make liberal use of the stuff. Numerous cuisines feature blood soups: the Polish czarnina(duck blood soup), Korean seonjiguk (pig blood curd soup), and dinuguan, a pig blood stew from the Philippines. Blood sausage—a prominent feature of our own Louisiana cuisine—is gross, but not nearly as gross as blood soup, with its vampirish connotations.

Rule Number 7: Insects are gross.
Anthropologist Melvin Harris has documented "insectivory" on every major continent. "From a nutritional standpoint," he argues in his book Good to Eat, "insect flesh is almost as nourishing as red meat or poultry.... The interesting fact is that most Westerners not only refrain from insectivory, but the mere thought of eating a grub or a termite...makes most people sick to their stomachs."

I once ordered mopani worms, a kind of caterpillar, in a restaurant in Johannesburg. The waiter was a member of the Xhosa ethnic group. As we were ordering, he felt compelled to say, "My people, we do not eat these things."

The worms arrived, served in a spicy sauce. They didn't really taste like anything. The texture was sort of like shrimp with the casing on: crunch, then squish. My friends and I took pictures.




Next Page
Page:
1 2 3