Your meal looks wonderful and smells delicious, but you are not certain what you have ordered. Your conversation with your friend would probably go like this:
FRIEND: "It's very tasty but I can't quite tell what it is. Is it beef?
YOU: "No. It tastes somewhat like beef, but it really isn't."
FRIEND: "It's not pork or mutton. But, it's tender and not particularly gamey. It's not deer meat."
YOU: "No, it's not. It's really not like anything I've ever had."
FRIEND: "The broth is tasty and the noodles are really tender and delicate."
YOU: "It tastes a little like the ox tail soup my old German grandmother made once. But it's not that either."
FRIEND: "Well, the closest thing I've ever had to this might be reindeer, but that's not what it is."
YOU: "Hmmm. I'm stumped. Whatever it is, I'm enjoying it."
After your dinner you might head back to your hotel, where you might Google the term "Besh Barmak" and find that the restaurant you have visited is known for serving a horse meat version of this dish and that horse had been the unidentifiable protein you had been enjoying for dinner. Now, if you are from the United States, and maybe from several other countries, you might be slightly dismayed at your discovery as horse meat is one of the strongest food taboos present in much of the world today (if the intense reactions to the European IKEA and McDonald's horse meat scandals are any indication).
My experience at dinner this evening was a bit different than the imaginary dialogue I constructed in only one way: in my case, I intentionally ordered the Besh Barmak with horse. And I found it to be tasty and pleasant and exactly as described in my imaginary dialogue: somehow like beef or something similar, but really not quite the same. What does it taste like? It tastes like horse. By that, I mean it does have its own distinct flavor, which I might be able to recognize if I ever were to eat it again.
One of my Kyrgyz friends at work has been encouraging me to try horse, so tonight I finally had the courage to do so. He told me horse meat has 1/2 the fat of beef, less cholesterol, fewer calories, and more iron. And it's free of all antibiotics, he bragged. He told me horse is not consumed on an everyday basis by people in Kyrgyzstan. He said in his family they just have it on very special occasions.
Why do we European-based folks avoid horse meat? The roots of this taboo can possibly be traced to Pope Gregory III, who announced a papal ban on eating horse flesh in 732 because the practice was associated with Paganism. Additionally, the horse's function as a laborer made it more valuable for other purposes than consumption as food. Today, though, I think it is our culture's love affair with horses and our close bond with these creatures that make the thought of consuming horse meat so upsetting to many. However, when I lived in the Netherlands, I traveled through Belgium and France rather frequently and did notice a butcher shop or two in those countries that did advertise horse meat as the taboo against this practice is weaker in those two nations than in much of the world.
Before you condemn me for my dinner, think about this. Every night in Arkansas in the summer I would sit on my front porch and watch the chicken trucks go by, headed to the processing plant and I would observe the chickens crammed together cruelly in their horribly confined pens. And when the wind was coming from the right direction and I could smell the stench emanating from the chicken plant as they were processing those mistreated chickens to make nuggets and other products, I wondered if eating a chicken nugget was such a great idea after all. Tonight I will not judge the Kyrgyz for eating his horse, nor the Arkansan for eating her cruelly mined chicken nuggets, nor the vegan for drinking the California almond milk that comes from the trees that use far too much of their region's precious water supply, and will simply observe that we should always be mindful that very many of our culinary choices come with cultural, economic, political, and ethical dimensions that should always be contemplated. And sometimes when we leap outside our comfortable and familiar foodways and directly encounter our personal food taboos it can help us reconsider our own practices of mindful eating.
I felt like I was reading Atticus Finch's words at the end of this post.
ReplyDeleteAnd boy I certainly do not miss that smell.
Gee, now I sounded like Holden Caufield.