Reading from offal

I don't normally fancy duck, but the slices of meat on his tray looked lean enough to pass muster. Anyway, it was getting late, and there were few food options left. It was either this pushcart or ... or nothing else. The others on this street had even less palatable stuff. 

"Twenty baht?" 

Good value for a bowl of duck noodles.  

But when it came, it wasn't quite what I expected. There wasn't much meat, but there was gizzard, liver, congealed blood, not including a few other pieces that I couldn't identify. If you liked these things, you would say the hawker was quite generous in his serving. 

'Generous' was not the word that came to my mind. 'Oh, my Buddha!' was more like it. But after a moment's recoil, I reminded myself that in fact, I have eaten these things before, with no great calamity. I will not cavil tonight, not when it's only 20 baht. 

To be fair, it was a tasty bowl of noodles and these items were quite edible. Even the gizzard was tender. My difficulty was one of habit and mental association. 

Habit is easily explained. I rarely eat these parts -- as for why, I will come to later -- and I have never acquired a taste for them. 

Mental association was the bigger hurdle. While we seldom see duck innards in Singapore -- but then again I may be wrong, because I don't even look at stalls selling duck-anything, since I'm not a duck fan -- we do see pig innards.

Here, these "Kway chap" stalls tend to lay out the various parts on trays, presumably for customers to admire and pick from. The most disgusting trays, to my eyes at least, are those holding intestines, I mean, come on, that's where shit is made. Dispassionately speaking, we know the cook has washed the intestines thoroughly, but food is seldom mind over matter. 

It's no use that the liver, kidneys, congealed blood and other impossible parts are laid out in separate trays. So long as they share the same countertop as the intestines, so long as they are under the same "Kway chap" signboard, they're all tarred with the same brush. Or smeared with the same shit, to put it another way. 

I have to admit that in my case, two other (related) factors operate. One is class. The people who order from kway chap stalls are often the older, working-class guys, and much as I may wish to deny it, there is unavoidably the feeling that I don't belong. More yet, that I don't want to be like them, slurping pig organ soup with one leg propped up on a stool, knee almost to collar-bone, the way coolies sat for generations past. 

The second is language and is a consequence of class. People usually order in Hokkien, and if you can't order kway chap in Hokkien, you'd feel like an idiot. My Hokkien is non-existant; I certainly don't know the names of the various parts, so how do I even begin to order? 

So, between the shit, the coolies and my dialect-incompetence, I don't venture near innards or viscera, thank you very much. 

* * * * * 

But there is one more intriguing factor which I first heard from someone interviewed on television. She said that in modern Western civilisation, we try to suppress evidence of violence in our food. The more I think about it, the more I believe there is a lot of truth in it. 

And this is where being Singaporean is so useful. We stand at the very boundary, able to see both East and West. Some of us, like myself, for example, have absorbed the sensibilities of the West when it comes to food and its presentation while other Singaporeans still swear by kway chap. But even if we're Western-acculturated, we can't help walking past trays of intestines, or for that matter, chicken rice stalls with 17 heads and necks hanging from hooks under spotlight. 

They do this because it is a form of advertisement. The 17 heads and necks say to passers-by, see we're a popular stall, we've sold 17 chickens (which may well mean 170 plates of chicken-rice) just this lunch hour alone. Come try our highly-acclaimed dish. 

As Singaporeans, we can read the message. 

I don't know if Westerners can read the same message. My guess is that some will think it's incredibly barbaric to leave the chickens' heads hanging when the bodies have been stripped bare and served. After all, I have heard of westerners who lose their appetites when a steamed fish is presented complete with head. 

A few years ago, a friend from the Philippines told me how his guest fainted at the sight of a roasted suckling pig. Now, the Pinoys love this delicacy and the piglet is roasted whole. There is no pretending that here was an innocent little animal that met a violent death. 

This aversion to evidence of killing and rough butchering may explain the trend to serve meat in fillets, comfortably removed from tell-tale signs of their origins. More and more, our food come looking like something manufactured, rather than dismembered limbs from the killing fields. 

Yet, I don't think anyone in the West is queasy about shellfish. Lobsters and crabs are generally served in their shells, and if you're dealing with crab for example, you have to tear off the claws to get at the meat. 

It may be that the aversion to violence is limited to mammals and birds that we encounter while they're alive. Thus chicken feet and mammalian viscera are just too incriminating to contemplate, but crab claws don't seize our conscience. 

My reference to chicken feet tells you we're talking about Westernisation here. You find this dish all over Hong Kong and Thailand. I haven't looked, but it won't surprise me if the rest of the Chinese, the Vietnamese and other Asian cultures also have something similar. And then there are pig trotters still recogniseable as such. The Burmese have fried sparrows, served whole, beak and all. 

The West was once like that too. Whole animals were roasted on a spit, and game birds brought in to be defeathered, cleaned and cooked. People used knives not quite as daintily as today, but to really carve out a joint for themselves. 

When do we carve anything today in our urban lives? Maybe just the Thanksgiving or Christmas turkey. That bird is still served whole because tradition dictates it, but through the rest of the year it's turkey fillets and clean cuts. 

* * * * * 

I speculate that a growing distaste for violence in our food came hand in hand with a growing recognition that animals as living things are not all that far apart from us humans. One characteristic of our modern culture is empathy, perhaps a kind of sentimentality, for animals. Unfortunately we still have to eat, and the best we can do to salve our conscience is to close our eyes to the violence that brought our food to the table. 

© Yawning Bread 

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