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Strange Foods. Jerry Hopkins
Читать онлайн.Название Strange Foods
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9781462916764
Автор произведения Jerry Hopkins
Жанр Книги о Путешествиях
Издательство Ingram
It is well-known that the American Indian originated in what is now Mongolia, and it’s believed that they brought the dog with them when they crossed the Bering Sea and eventually settled the wilderness that became North America. When European explorers and settlers arrived in the New World, they counted seventeen dog varieties, many of them raised specifically as food, although it was noted that not all tribes indulged. Those that did included the Iroquois and several Algonquin tribes of the central and eastern woodlands and the Utes of Utah, who cooked and ate dog meat before performing sacred ceremonial dances. While the very name of the Arapahoe means “dog-eater.” David Comfort writes in The First Pet History of the World (1994) that puppies were generally preferred because of their tenderness: “They were fattened with a special mixture of pemmican and dried fruit. After harvest with a tomahawk, the puppy was suspended upside down from a lodge pole, and the carcass hand-marinated with buffalo fat. Then it was skewered.”
Many of the early European arrivals contentedly, or at least circumstantially, joined in. According to Mr. Comfort’s text, Cabeza de Vaca, the Spanish explorer, was shipwrecked in the Gulf of Mexico and wandered for eight years on foot throughout the American Southwest, eating canine regularly. In Christopher Columbus’s time, Mexico’s only domesticated livestock were the turkey and the dog and according to a history written in the sixteenth century, the two meats were served in a single dish. Meriwether Lewis, leader of the Lewis and Clark Expedition that opened the American Northwest, wrote in his journal in 1804, “Having been so long accustomed to live on the flesh of dogs, the greater part of us have acquired a fondness for it, and our original aversion for it overcome by reflecting that while we subsisted on that food we were fatter, stronger, and in general enjoyed better health than at any period since leaving buffalo country.” As recently as 1928, the Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen ate his sled dogs in the Arctic in his attempt to reach the North Pole, although that was, admittedly, for reasons of survival and not by choice.
Dog Capital of the World
Guangzhou, about two hours from Hong Kong, is regarded as the “dog capital” of the gastronomical world. I stayed on Shamian Island, a onetime sandspit in the Pearl River that was ceded to the British and French following the Opium Wars of the 18th century, now a European-styled neighborhood with gardens and colonial buildings, as well as several tourist-class hotels. Across the canal separating Shamian Island from what is otherwise an undistinguished Chinese city is the Qingping Market, one of the late Premier Deng Xiaoping’s most radical innovations, a street market operated by entrepreneurs, a concept that subsequently spread throughout much of China. The market in Guangzhou is different from the others, however.
Once past two city blocks of stalls selling traditional medicine—beetles, lizards, starfish, seahorses, deer antlers, flowers and the like, all dried—I came to a cross street where the goods were all alive. Hundreds of frogs hopped in wire cages and eels and large water bugs swarmed in plastic tanks of aerated water. More tubs offered crawling crabs, crayfish, worms, and scorpions. There were turtles from one inch across to the size of a small beer keg. In metal cages stacked head-high were dogs, cats, small deer, pigeons, peacocks, guinea pigs, rabbits, and a number of dog-sized rodents called coypu. Everything was butchered on the spot on request or shoved into a sack for home preparation if the buyer wished to keep the dinner fresh.
In a phrase: a take-away zoo. Best to arrive before 10:00 am for the widest choice.
Nor was canine cuisine limited to Asia and North America. For at least a thousand years, Polynesians cherished the poi dog, so called because the animal’s diet was vegetarian, consisting largely of poi, or cooked taro root. This was one of the food animals taken to what is now Hawaii on primitive sailing ships from Tahiti and the Marquesas (along with the pig). At large feasts in Hawaii in the early 1800s, hosted by local royalty and attended by sailors from England and the United States, as many as two hundred to four hundred dogs were served at a single sitting.
In 1870, a cookbook was published in France with recipes for dozens of dishes based on the meat of dogs. Across the English Channel, however, the British typically rejected anything enjoyed by the French and in the 1890s Punch, the humor magazine, published several cartoons demonstrating their disapproval. The same magazine also satirically described an anonymous Englishman’s encounter with a canine meal:
...he brightened up
And thought himself in luck
When close before him what he saw
Looked something like a duck!
Still cautious grown, but, to be sure,
His brain he set to rack;
At length he turned to one behind,
And, pointing, cried, ‘Quack, quack?’
The Chinese gravely shook his head,
Next made a reverent bow;
And then expressed what dish it was,
By uttering, ‘Bow-wow-wow!’
Today, dog remains popular in southern China, Hong Kong, parts of Japan, Korea, much of Southeast Asia, and to a lesser degree in Mexico, Central and South America, but not without controversy. For years, organizers of the world’s most famous dog show, in England, welcomed sponsorship from the Korean electronics giant Samsung, until the International Fund for Animal Welfare protested in 1995, claiming that up to two million dogs were processed for the Korean food industry annually.
When such protests earned worldwide media attention, drawing attention to the slaughter of dog for meat in Thailand, Britain’s National Canine Defense League complained. It was no crime to kill and eat dogs in Thailand, so there was little the government could do to satisfy anyone at the league. Still, when Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip visited Bangkok in 1996, officials in Sakon Nakhon—the province where most of the dogs were killed-vowed to enact measures to try to keep any dogs from being butchered during the five-day visit so as not to offend Britain’s royalty. It was unlikely, however, that they would be anywhere nearby, as the province is 341 miles from Bangkok.
Men in the dog business must be selective. If the dogs haven’t eaten well, the meat may be stringy and possibly unhealthy, and many of the strays have rabies or mangy skins. In some Asian countries today the movement is not only to regulate the slaughter and promote cleanliness, but also to identify establishments where dog meat is served, because sometimes it is substituted for something else. For example, I was served “wild boar” in Saigon that I’m sure wasn’t boar—the day after seeing a flatbed truck loaded with caged dogs on the highway leading into the city. A coincidence? Perhaps.
I have also eaten dog in China and Vietnam. As a photographer friend took pictures of a skinned dog just delivered to a restaurant in China’s Yunnan province, a woman beckoned to us to come in. On the stove, she had some bite-sized, stir-fried haunch in a wok, left over from lunch, with a taste like cooked beef, slightly greasy, as dog, I’m told, often is. Two weeks later, in the mountainous region of northwestern Vietnam, near the Chinese border, I was served thin slices of dog tongue stir-fried with garlic and vegetables and while visiting a weekend marketplace in the same province I saw more than a dozen well-fed dogs of various breeds for sale (for about $10 apiece), and later I observed members of the hill tribe prominent in that area leading dinner home on a leash. The same year, 1998, the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development said there were at least fourteen million dogs in Vietnam, their numbers swelling as more and more farmers turned to raising dogs instead of pigs.
In Thailand, I found dog in the open markets as well, butchered and ready to go, but also cooked into a rich stew that sold for about eighty cents a portion, and deep-fried into a sort of jerky that was very hard to chew. This was in the province that more or less declared a moratorium on dog during the British queen’s visit, where on the average day, I was told, approximately a thousand dogs were killed for markets in the region. This region is also known for a kind of Oriental dog tartare, where raw dog meat is chopped almost