Animal Parts
(an extension of the piece below, “chinatown”)
I was sitting in a basement restaurant in Chinatown, San Francisco when I came to a realization that had been crawling around the recesses of my brain for a while. I hate our country. I don’t hate it because of politics, or the health care system or the fact that children go missing every day and are never found. I hate our country because we don’t use every part of the animal. We only use the best cuts of meat and use everything else for dog food or hot dogs or feed for the animals that we’re taking the best cuts from. Our neglect of animal parts stems from two things, I feel. Money and cowardice.
Compared to most of the world, our nation is loaded. People are still poor and still dying of hunger but as a whole we’re fairly well off. This, I think, gives us an inflated sense of ourselves when it comes to food. We must have the best cuts, darling. We must pay exorbitant amounts of money for these cuts as well. Now, these cuts of meat—the strip steaks and lamb shanks and filet mignons—they are amazing. If cooked right they can melt in your mouth as the juices flood your taste buds with something akin to an orgasm in your mouth. There is nothing wrong with those cuts, they should enjoyed to the fullest.
What I’m saying, though, is that we ignore everything else. We ignore the heart, liver, brain, gonads, ass, everything. In other countries, people don’t do that. Sure, it may take a couple hours to stew something with some pigs’ feet or ass in it because it the meat is tough and it just takes a while to soften, but who cares? In the places where they do that, there’s a certain feeling of community involvement in food. Here, when we go out to dinner, we eat in booths by ourselves, huddled away to the point that if you make too much noise you get looks from other customers trying to enjoy their own meals. IN other places, there are communal tables. You make friends. Think of a hibachi restaurant with large tables surrounding the grill—they are excellent examples of what public eating should be like.
On the topic of cowardice, I think it’s fairly simple to understand. You put a cooked pig’s tail or a cow brain on a plate in front of an average American and they will look at you like you’re crazy. Or vomit—if they’re weak-willed they may vomit. After shaking their head they’ll yell at you for serving them something so disgusting, so horrid. I bet you, though, that if you stripped the meat off the tail, or cut up the brain or did something so that it did not look like the organ it was, and told that same person who yelled at you that it was just some beef, or some pork, they would eat it. They would swallow it whole because of the tenderness and then lick the plate clean of the juices of rendered animal fat and some vegetables.
The one place that those parts are actually served is out of the price range of most normal people. Fancy restaurants, ones with words in their title like brasserie or chez or a foreign word that may not actually mean anything out of context, serve animal parts. The problem is, though, that a pig heart or cow liver, something that costs around a dollar a pound at a deli that actually sells them, costs around forty bucks for a plate. Who has money like that to spend? I don’t. And these people who order this stuff? They think they’re getting authentic (insert country here) cuisine. They don’t realize they’re just getting peasant cuisine. They think it is exotic, they don’t realize the “authentic” cuisine is just poor cuisine. People ate the parts and learned to cook the parts because that is the only thing they had.
I admit that some chefs are doing the right thing. They are trying to get people to eat these things because they are good. They are trying to introduce things in ways that we as Americans, with our “refined” palates, will accept into our gullets. It will be difficult, though, I think. It will be difficult because we do not want to change.
