Innocent lambs with delicious intestinal tracks !

What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger!

 

Having searched the web for some hours trying to find a food blog that I consider worth writing about I toppled over a forum where some people were entangled in some really stormy debates about food in other cultures. It started all with the impressive experiences of a guy in south-east Asia where he tried some really gross stuff like roasted feet of geese and soup that is made of swallow nests and stuff where the general “European” would shake his head in disgust. At first my reaction was quite similar to those who opposed totally to that kind of food but the more I immerged into that theme and the more I read about it some very interesting thoughts came up and made me think “Why not?”

He continued writing about that immerging in another culture doesn’t solely mean visiting all the sights, or national parks, or doing the common stuff proposed by a tourist guide but trying to think “foreign”. That means that being in south-east Asia, for example, eating insects, buying meat where a thousand of flies have sat before (although this I wouldn’t really recommend) is part of your everyday life. You shouldn’t shy away beforehand, even though you might be shocked what they consume on a daily basis or even how this food is traded. For our European standards cannot be seen as a global measurement since we live in an antibiotic-contaminated, sterile environment. But considering that the world doesn’t have all those standards and all the luxury like supermarkets filled to the bursting point, we should try to think out of the box and come off our high horse.

Thinking of all those meals provided by people from Asia or Africa which we might find disgusting at the very first, there is a lot of other stuff provided by ourselves that is at least as horrific. I proved it on my own in Italy, just because I didn’t want to be rude and to refuse but braided lamb intestines filled with mincemeat is not the dish I would have even imagined could exist. It does! But surprisingly enough it actually doesn’t taste that bad. I guess it’s more the imagination of eating the intestinal tract of an innocent lamb that makes us shudder.

Eating exotic meals doesn’t necessarily mean driving endangered species towards extinction. Of course, there is a lot of food provided that is ethnically or sustainably not advisable, but apart from shark fin soup or the meat of primates there are a lot of other things that are absolutely worth taking into consideration. The discussion at this forum ended up by saying that experiencing different kinds of food is not just to prove oneself as open-minded or even courageous but it will broaden your horizons, it may change your view on this culture and it might also influence your personality and the way you approach your life in future.