Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls(43)

Another dish was made entirely of organs, which again had been hacked beyond recognition. The heart was there, the lungs, probably the comb and intestines as well. I don’t know why this so disgusted me. If I was a vegetarian, okay, but if you’re a meat eater, why draw these arbitrary lines? “I’ll eat the thing that filters out toxins but not the thing that sits on top of the head, doing nothing.” And why agree to eat this animal and not that one?

I remember reading a few years ago about a restaurant in the Guangdong Province that was picketed and shut down because it served cat. The place was called the Fangji Cat Meatball Restaurant, which isn’t exactly hiding anything. Go to Fangji and you pretty much know what you’re getting. My objection to cat meatballs is not that I have owned several cats and loved them, but that I try not to eat things that eat meat. Like most Westerners I tend toward herbivores and things that like grain: cows, chickens, sheep, etc. Pigs eat meat—a pig would happily eat a human—but most of the pork we’re privy to was raised on corn or horrible chemicals rather than on other pigs and dead people.

There are distinctions among the grazing animal eaters as well. People who like lamb and beef, at least in North America, tend to draw the line at horse, which in my opinion is delicious. The best I’ve had was served at a restaurant in Antwerp, a former stable called, cleverly enough, the Stable. Hugh was right there with me, and though he ate the same thing I did, he practically wept when someone in China mentioned eating sea horses. “Oh, those poor things,” he said. “How could you?”

I went, “Huh?”

It’s like eating poultry but taking a moral stand against Peeps, those sugarcoated chicks they sell at Easter. “A sea horse is not related to an actual horse,” I said. “They’re fish, and you eat fish all the time. Are you objecting to this one because of its shape?”

He said he couldn’t eat sea horses because they were friendly and never did anyone any harm. This as opposed to those devious, bloodthirsty lambs whose legs we so regularly roast with rosemary and new potatoes.

The dishes we had at the Farming Family Happiness were meant to be shared, and as the pretty woman with the broad face brought them to the table, the man across from me beamed and reached for his chopsticks. “You know,” he said, “this country might have its faults, but it is virtually impossible to get a bad meal here.”

I didn’t say anything.

Another of the dishes that day consisted of rooster blood. I’d thought it would be liquid, like V8 juice, but when cooked it coagulated into little pads that had the consistency of tofu. “Not bad,” said the girl who was seated beside me, and I watched as she slid one into her mouth. Jill was American, a peace corps volunteer who’d come to Chengdu to teach English. “In Thailand last year, I ate dog face,” she told me.

“Just the face?”

“Well, head and face.” She was in a small village, part of a team returning abducted girls to their parents. To show their gratitude, the locals prepared a feast. Dog was considered good eating. The head was supposedly the best part and, rather than offend her hosts, Jill ate it.

This, for many, is flat-out evil, but the rest of the world isn’t like America, where it’s become virtually impossible to throw a dinner party. One person doesn’t eat meat, while another is lactose intolerant or can’t digest wheat. You have vegetarians who eat fish and others who won’t touch it. Then there are vegans, macrobiotics, and a new group, flexitarians, who eat meat if not too many people are watching. Take that into consideration, and it’s actually rather refreshing that a twenty-two-year-old from the suburbs of Detroit will pick up her chopsticks and at least try the char-pei.

I’d like to be more like Jill, but in China, something kept holding me back. In clean, sophisticated Japan, the rooster blood, arranged upon a handmade plate between the perfect tempura snow pea and a radish carved to look like a first-trimester fetus, would have seemed like a fine idea. “We ought to try making this at home,” I’d have said to Hugh. Here, though, I thought of the sanitation grade and of the rooster, pecking maggots out of human feces before being killed. Most of the restaurants in China smelled dirty to me, though what I was picking up on was likely some unfamiliar ingredient, and I was allowing the things I’d seen earlier in the day—the spitting and snot-blowing, etc.—to fill in the blanks.

Then again, maybe not.

While on our trip we ate at normal, everyday places and sometimes bought food on the street. Our only expensive meal was in Beijing, where we went alone to a fancy restaurant recommended by an acquaintance. The place was located in an old warehouse and had been lavishly decorated. There was a wine expert and someone whose job it was to drop by every three minutes and refill your water glass. We had the Peking duck, which was expertly carved rather than hacked and was served with little pancakes. Toward the end of the meal I stepped into the men’s room to pee, and there, disintegrating in the Western-style toilet, was an unflushed turd, a little reminder saying, “See, you’re still in China!”

Back at the table I asked for the bill. Then I remembered where I was and amended it to “the check.” In France, you can die waiting to pay for your meal, which is something I’ve never understood. How can they not want me out of here? I’ll think. Ten minutes might pass. Then twenty, me watching as the waiter does everything but accept my goddamn money.