If one had to look at a picture of the turkey one is eating this upcoming Thanksgiving Day — a picture of this turkey when it was still alive — I reckon there’s a good chance one would have trouble swallowing those hunks of bird.
I make this claim, not because I think there would be some moment of guilt — a realization the consumer has taken to masticating the flesh of a fellow sentient being exploited for our purposes. Rather, I bet the sight of that grotesque head of bubbling skin atop that freakish neck and absurd-looking body would just gross people out.
People eat the ugliest things.
But as hideous as the barnyard version of the equally-ugly Meleagris gallopavo might be, it quite frankly is an angelic fantasy princess in comparison to some of the other critters we bipedal otherwise-reasoning apes consume.
For example, this past summer I took a trek to St. John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador. Among the many east-coast pleasures in which my travelling party partook, we enjoyed the opportunity of some freshly caught, recently boiled crustaceans of the big-clawed variety — lobster.
I’ve eaten lobster before, so it’s not as if I was for the first time discovering the ocean creature’s soft buttery goodness during my vacation. However, at all other times I’ve come in contact with this member of the Nephropidae family, it has already been stripped of its shell, guts and shape and displayed eloquently next to an equally-sized portion of blue-rare cow. This most recent time though, not so.
The lobster in question came fully cooked, but also fully intact. While I still managed to eat and enjoy the sea bug, I did so despite its absolutely horrendous alien appearance. That must be the ugliest of anything we people eat.
But then again, there are all those mollusks. Who doesn’t enjoy a fresh oyster on the half shell or bowl full of mussels? But also, why do we eat these things? Really, what is wrong with us?
I suppose the amazing thing with any of these animals is that, at some point, someone had to be the first person to do it — to eat such sickening-looking gobs of flesh.
It’s hard to imagine some prehistoric human relation meandering through a damp meadow in what is now modern-day France and coming across a big slimy snail slithering along the underbrush, and the person actually deciding the act of putting that thing in his mouth, chewing it and swallowing it is a good idea. Bizarre!
Once upon a time, like all contemporary university bachelor or arts graduates, I too taught English in South Korea for a year. Among the many adventures during my expat era was the consumption of pan-fried silkworms. ‘Han-guk-in’ just seem to revel in these chewy woody abominations, served by street-side vendors that are quite popular across the Peninsula.... Actually, when one thinks about it, there really isn’t much we people won’t eat. I’m guessing most the dishes mentioned in this column probably became human fare as part of a wager.
The turkey, which as far as our bird choices go is probably the least attractive, still in orders of magnitude is less hideous than the lobster, snail or worm. In any case, it is a tad strange we so willingly consume what is obviously disgusting.
My guess is, if we humans ever do venture to other planets in other solar systems, and if those planets contain life, one of our first tasks will be betting the other astronauts and cosmonauts to find the most disgusting extraterrestrial monster and eat it.
Then we’ll turn that poor monster into a time-honoured delicacy for some reason.
Carter Haydu can be reached at 691-1265.
