One day I was just kicking back at home watching television when I turned on a National Geographic program filmed from a remote mountainous province in China.  It looked interesting. The indigenous people that lived there were going to whip together their special delicacy in honor of the special guests who came to visit – the journalists and cameramen who were there to film.  

     They didn’t show the slaughter of the bull, the slitting of its throat, but the camera got in close as the men pushed and pulled the struggling animal in order to pin him down and keep him from moving. It took a good crew of men to finally subdue the beast. After they slit its throat, they ran for more buckets to catch the blood as it gushed and spurted out of the animal’s neck.  The bull wheezed and gurgled and snorted before he finally went in to his death throes, his struggles gradually growing weaker and weaker until he finally died. The men then heaved the enormous animal on to its side.  The legs were by then as stiff as a wooden coffee table.  They then proceeded to peel and scrape and tear the skin off with long, sharp knives which they repeatedly sharpened. First, they hacked the legs off, then they carved large slabs of meat off its body.

     After carving up the beef and sectioning it off, they put the meat into large vats and minced it, pounding and thrashing and pulverizing the meat with long reeds, only stopping long enough to add fresh blood when it got too dry. They did this for hours to tenderize the meat. They wound up using all the blood. When it finally had the appearance of ground up hamburger meat, they inspected it and nodded and they all agreed that it was ready for the next process. 

     They formed a large mound from part of the meat, a big round paddy, and they placed it on a large plate and placed it in the center of the table.  This was the first entrée.        

     For the next stage, the contents of the bull’s colon were removed by hand, the camera graphically showing the cook’s arm reaching into the torn anus of the bull and hooking out feces that was green and grassy. It was thoroughly mixed with the bull’s urine.  The animals only graze on grass in central China, so it was a green mush. The cook mixed it all together and then pressed it into another fresh mound before placing it on a plate and putting it beside the other plate of ground up meat that was on the table. They added a few spices to the dish but I never knew what they were. Would it matter?  So let me get this straight – dinner is raw, minced meat, with a side dish of urine and feces.  

    The journalists got some good shots of the whole family sitting down and enjoying their meal served on long tubular reeds, but I never saw them taking a bite.  

Nancy O at www.womentravellingalone.blogspot.com