A pleasure to eat you!

I love raw mushrooms. The older and funkier the better! This has been a source of much amusement for the women who work as fruit shop tellers who still to this day, 2 years later, love to ask me, “So do you eat it like that? So you don’t eat meat??” To them this is just thrilling! (Which admittedly in a job like that is about all the action they’re likely to see), but to them the idea of someone not eating meat is just madness!

It makes you wonder doesn’t it though? We’re all human beings, and yet the things we eat vary so wildly from person to person, let alone from culture to culture. Us non-meat eaters aside, isn’t it amazing what will be eaten, given half a chance?

I mean no one I know would eat Smalahove ( A dish where the skin and fleece of a sheep’s head is torched, the brain removed, and the head then salted, smoked or dried, then boiled for about 3 hours and served with mashed rutabaga and potatoes ), but to Norwegians its a very popular dish! Lets face it mutton is mutton, but the second it’s on a head suddenly everyone’s wonder what the ‘Chicken Dish of the Day’ is instead!



Or another sheepy dish my ancestors ate that I wouldn’t touched with a long electric prod, let alone a fork, is Haggis – made of a sheep’s heart, liver and lungs, minced with onion, oatmeal and a variety of spices and then stuffed into the sheep’s stomach and simmered to a juicy finish!
(Waiter! Where the hell’s our Chicken already??)



Ironically though I find a lot of people the world over will eat and enjoy something they’d never consider putting in their mouths if you conveniently forget to mention what it is exactly…
Why yes it’s beef…. Kinda….well….boy bulls have them anyway…. So, want some more beans with that?



The fact is if it’s an animal there’s probably someone out there who’ll happily eat it. Heck where as most westerners will eat beef happily, to Hindu’s that’s a big religious no-no – how could you??! But then we turn around and point at some Asian cultures that eat cat and dog and hiss and boo them royally. (They might then go, “Haha! You eat processed cheese! Fools!”)
It’s a merry little circle.

From cows and chickens to horses and dolphins, snotty looking snails to deadly puffer fish, to rabbits, guinea pigs and regular pigs. The human omnivore eats them all! Nom nom nom!



Anyway it was just a thought I was having, the strangeness of the human creature and its diet.
I’m off to eat my suddenly extra nice seeming, innocent little mushrooms! Enjoy your lunch, whatever it might be (or what ever it might have been!)