Duck toes and shark fin soup

In China, people are very pragmatic about food. This can be seen from the fact that there seems to be a general consensus that if an animal is grown for food, every bit of it should be consumed. Besides, China as a country has gone through so many bouts of famine, that its people have been forced to come up with ways of making full use of anything and everything edible.

As a result, Chinese people have learned to prepare food out of every inch of an animal, guts and intestines included, a practice which would be frowned upon by most westerners.

Pig hooves and seahorses

A Chinese friend of mine who moved to her husband's native country of Finland, and who has ever since her move abhorred at the price of food in this northern country, was overjoyed to find that the local farmer's market sold pig's hooves for pennies. Needless to say, when she cooked dinner from them to the whole family, she ended up eating these dubious animal parts alone... Chinese people are also known to eat pig's ears, which are generally marinated, cut into thin slices and served as an appetizer.

This practice of utilizing every bit of an animal also applies to chickens and ducks, which are consumed tongue and toes included. Bird's feet are widely available in almost any restaurant, where they come either poached, steamed or fried. The feet are also eaten as an appetizer, probably due to the fact that they don't contain very much meat.

The best way to eat bird's feet is to give them a few good swirls in the mouth to separate the meat from the bone and then spit out what is left. To put it bluntly, there is no civilized way to eat them, so no use in trying to act all refined.

And if you think that Chinese people in general are innovative in the culinary sense, you'd be simply astonished by the imaginativeness of the country's Cantonese speaking population! They have, for example, come up with the idea of adding seahorses, a common ingredient used in Traditional Chinese Medicine, to soup. Seahorses, either as traditional medicine or in soup, are supposed to help envigorate the skin and cleanse the digestive system.

Dubious diet

Seahorses are a popular delicacy in China's Cantonese speaking region. (Image: China News Service)If eating seahorse soup or duck feet and tongues wasn't enough to cause emotional upheavals for or against, the omnivorousness of the Chinese can at times also spark moral debate. One of the most incomprehensible food-related practices involves torturing bears in the name of Traditional Chinese Medicine or superstition. Bear bile is commonly used as traditional Chinese medicine for chronic stomach disease, and in order to extract this bile, thousands of bears all over Asia have been confined to small cages. Due to its rarity, bear meat, and especially the paws, is a highly coveted delicacy. Eating bear meat is also believed to help strengthen the body and combat rheumatism and the flu etc. And not only do many bears end locked up in cages, they are also being savagely hunted by poachers for their paws.

Shark fin soup, originally a specialty of the imperial court, also deserves to be included on the culinary blacklist. It is unethical because its rarity and thus high market price makes it very a coveted delicacy, which is why fishermen sometimes only cut off a shark's fins and discard the rest of the carcass in the sea. This practice is not only a mindless waste of food, but also unbelievably cruel!

But let's return to the subject of smaller sea creatures, namely intoxicated shrimp, for a while. The Shanghainese have a reputation of wanting to always stand out in the crowd. In order to emphasize their eccentricity, they continue to invent new and strange foods, just to annoy their countrymen. One of these new and strange foods is drunken shrimp! They are served alive, swimming in sweet alcohol. If you order this dish, it is advisable to wait a while and let the alcohol work its magic before biting into them, just to ensure you won't get bitten back.