Fast Food, Famine and Fol-de-rol
The Japanese have their sushi: If it comes from the sea the Japanese will eat it raw with a horse-radish condiment: octopods, cephalopods, gastropods, crustaceans, cetaceans, the eggs of various marine life-forms, sea-weed; even an extremely porous black volcanic 'foam' crushed and pressed on sticky rice with slices of the dorsal fin of a young blue-fish. (or is that a dolphin...?)
The Scots have their haggis: a dreadful, slaughter-house mixture of minced offal (the heart, lungs, liver, kidneys, etc.) of a sheep or calf mixed with suet, onions, oatmeal, and seasonings, stuffed into the stomach of the slaughtered animal, boiled and promptly buried in a deep unmarked hole. (A little known fact: Robert Bruce IV forestalled a seemingly inevitable siege at the Battle of Bannockburn by tossing a haggis into the water supply of Stirling Castle, thereby forcing the English defenders to flee in disgust.)
The French have their escargot: a gastropod mollusk steeped in a garlic sauce and, by plucking the steaming, rubbery nugget from its shell by utilizing a plier-like device and teeny-tiny fork, is consumed in orgiastic ecstasy. Followed by a dry white wine. Preferably, Chateau en Ebriate, '75, before the blight, on the south-eastern slope above the rocky brook, up-stream of the waste disposal facility. (Always keep in mind that 'fol-de-rol' is a French word.)
Australian aboriginal people gobble up juicy, thumb-sized grub-worms. Without 'fol-de-rol' or a garlic sauce.
But the Chinese take the cake in serving up the most god-awful, repulsive stuff for daily consumption. However, before I launch into a litany of disgusting dishes, (the tension is palpable, isn't it?) a cultural side-note is necessary.
The Chinese people must be in close proximity to food at all times. Severe anxiety otherwise results. If there are Chinese present anywhere, anytime, in any circumstance, comestibles are present, too. Sidewalk and road-side snack vendors are found wherever two or more Chinese congregate; including other vendors.
(My take on this fixation on food is that it is a collective defense mechanism against the relentlessly recurring cycles of famine resulting from millennia of despotic rulers, natural disasters and the generally unsophisticated, unscientific methods of peasant farming. The Chinese, for all their scientific advancements, never learned the science of hybridization, for example. And if they did, they never bothered with a systematic application of the science.
Food shortage in China is no secret; most American kids in the 1950's and 60's were extorted to eat their veggies with a ladle of guilt for all of the poor starving children in China due in large part to Mao's 'Great Leap Forward'. One facet of this heinously hare-brained policy involved the attempted eradication of the sparrow population as 'vermin'. Sparrows were slaughtered in the millions thereby precipitating a bumper crop of pest insects which in turn wrought an ecologic nightmare.
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