What is it with Americans and their picky-eating when it comes to food? I'm not jsut talking about taste-buds here. Essentially everything we eat is disguised so we don’t have to think about where it came from of what it was before it ended up on our plant. Meat is the main victim here. I mean, we don’t even say cow or pig, we say beef or pork instead. We even change the name of the food so it is “less threatening”. (Okay, I do realize that poultry and fish are an exception here, but we’ll leave that out for the moment. I do wonder why that is though, is a cow more threatening to eat than a chicken?) Even when we buy meat and cook it ourselves, it is cut, wrapped, and frozen so it doesn’t appear anything like the animal it was. And I will say, even a whole turkey on Thanksgiving doesn’t remind me of a live turkey.
Go into any market outside the US and you will see entire animals just hanging there, waiting to be sold: whole chickens with feathers, pig heads, and cow legs. Every time I walk through a market like this, I think, wow, so good that I am NOT a vegetarian, and how refreshing is it to see fresh meat! Although, I am being unfair, it is not just Americans, I have an Irish friend who says that she eats meat, but only if she doesn’t have to know that it was an animal first. Unconscious eating.
I realize that I have always had a different perspective on this issue than most Americans. First of all, the fact that my family has an Elk farm and while we eat our delicious elk steak, we can look out and see the animals running around happily in the back pastures. This seems morbid to most and a lot of my friends comment on it when they come over for dinner, but really–it’s not, it’s natural. (Although, I am not going to lie and say that the first time I saw my Dad cutting up an elk–mind you it was only the meat at this point–at age 17, I decided to be a vegetarian, which lasted about 6 months.) Even before moving there, my parents were never ones to hide the fact that we were eating live animals. Heck, we used to get live lobsters from the store and boil them at home, usually letting my dog bark at them for a while, and my Dad would plop that entire lobster on our plates and say, “This is Fred…Eat up!” It got to the point that if he hadn’t named the lobster that was about to be consumed, my sister and I would say, “wait, wait, what’s his name??” For me, it has never been a mystery of where my food comes from. Conscious eating.
I happened to stumble across an episode of Top Chef Masters the other day, and one if the challenges was to cook food that is “seemingly inedible to most Americans” and one of the chefs put it, or “AWFUL” which means basically the innards of the animal. Heart, ears, tongue, and stomach. This reminded of one day while I was living in Peru, some work friends took me out to eat anticuchos, which is a traditional Peruvian dish (oh, probably should note that I am living in Lima, Peru for the summer…) and it is, in more simple terms, heart kabobs. They were quite nice, very dense meat, but very rich, a bit tough but not as much as you may think for being heart. Conclusion: Yum! Another day while eating lunch, I found a big chunk of liver in my soup. And another a whole chicken foot. Okay, I didn’t actually eat the chicken foot, but that was also more due to that fact that the friend I was with was so excited and wanted to trade soups–apparently she loves chicken feet.
People always talk about "the strange things while eating abroad"...but why are they so strange? Why shouldn’t we eat every part of the animal always. I mean, thinking realistically about it, if you are going to kill an animal for food, you might as well use it all up and not waste it. And if you are already eating the muscles of the animal, whats wrong with eating the heart–that’s a muscle–or anything other organ for that matter, it all comes out of the same animal, its all part of the same package. I feel like everyone else in the world eats all these parts of the animal (and sometimes as a delicacy, paté anyone?) except for the western world or maybe it’s just US.
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