Street food in Beijing
Jamie O'Shea of Supetouch visited Beijing and posted a photo essay of the street food. The images are beautifully gross. Black scorpions, seahorses, rat kebabs, lizard kebabs, and brains... lunchtime! Link (Thanks, Kirsten Anderson!)
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If you like this...Lots of good reviews of gross Chinese food here from a guy that actually goes out of his way to eat the wierdest stuff he can find!
http://www.weirdmeat.com/2004/04/weird-meat-master-list.html
Yeah but what percent of that goes to waste?
Nothing inherently wrong with rat -- it's a rodent; thin small rabbit, or squirrel if you want a more similar shape. The question is where the rat came from. City rats, certainly, have all the obvious issues, not least that people have deliberately been feeding them poison. Rats trapped out in the country might be perfectly reasonable.
(Of course my reaction to the classic dog-meat concept is similar. As long as the beast was raised and killed reasonably humanely, I have no objection. There are pets, there are working animals, and there are food animals, and some species have been used in more than one category. I know someone who kept mice as pets, and kept mice to feed to snakes; she had no trouble distinguishing the two sets but it freaked out some of her friends.)
For the rest... well, I've eaten grasshoppers and I _think_ I've had some variety of snake; lizard and scorpion don't bother me that much conceptually though I must admit the latter would make me pause for a moment. Still, is eating scorpion or seahorse really any stranger than eating shrimp?
"Mom! can I have a lizard-on-a-stick?"
"Not until you finish your rat-kebab!"
Sounds like just another episode of Bizarre Foods on the TravelChannel: http://www.travelchannel.com/TV_Shows/Bizarre_Foods
I highly recommend that show if you haven't gotten the chance to see it yet, as you'll learn there are far more "bizarre" things people eat than rat kabobs. Its right up there with MythBusters and Dirty Jobs. Mosquito eggs anyone?
#3
In my mind, eating scorpion is like eating shrimp without removing the shell, legs or head. So yeah, kinda strange.
Seahorses?
Seahorses have meat?
"You don't know how long it's been there!"
- Subotai, Conan The Barbarian
I had the white/gray scorpions in Beijing about a month ago. Hanglyman's comment is right, although the experience was more like eating a shrimp tail/head, but without any meat.
One thing you don't appreciate from the photos here is that the skewered scorpions on display (at least the ones I ate) were still squirming on their sticks, at least until they were cooked.
I visited the street markets on my last trip to Beijing. I had quite a bit of meat on a stick.
I had one of the starfish on a stick. It basically has a hard exterior and the inside was very similar to the stomach (green stuff) in a lobster.
Another one I had was a millipede. What was difficult about it was that the legs were quite sharp and cut up my mouth on the way down. There wasn't much meat on it though.
From somebody living in Beijing:
While the "street food" pictured here is available in Beijing, it's really only for sale in one place: the night market, a kilometer of gew-gaw sellers and touts that now has exit and entrance guards and a roped off path that you shuffle along like one of the lamer disneyland rides. It's full of tourists but like everywhere else in Beijing that attracts tourists 95% of them are Chinese people in from the countryside.
I've been there once and the worst thing about it is the sea-horses. Sea-horses are endangered and it makes me really sad to see both westerners and chinese people eating them just for the novelty.
Other weird things are available from grubbier, more traditional restaurants, like duck head, bird tongues, and pig skin made into strips of aspic but the actual street food sold from carts and booths is pretty tame. The most common is jian bing, a fresh-made egg crepe with onions and a crushed up fried cracker folded inside. Then there's ears of corn, steamed dumplings, sausage on a stick, and sweet potatoes cooked on an oil drum welded to a bicycle. These are the things you see people eating every day for lunch, though lots of middle-class people I know consider such food "not clean" and eat nearly every lunch at KFC.
Dog, mentioned by a commenter, is for sale, but only at Korean restaurants, which here are generally quite fancy affairs here you can grill or boil your own meat right at the table. There used to be Chinese places that had dogs in cages out back, but all my friends say they're long gone.
I second Kurtmac on Bizarre Foods. I'm not sure its still on, but I saw one that I think featured this same market. There were definitely sea horses anyway. What doesnt kill you, after all.
low calorie, high nutrition.
gross..but livey longey life.
From another person living in Beijing, Tobyfee has it right. It's a tourist place, and one goes there specifically to see (and possibly eat) weird food.
Not typical food by any stretch of the imagination.
As a former Beijing resident, I'm thirding Tobyfee and Hayagriva's opinions: the grilled beasts at Wangfujing night market are tourist fodder. It's too bad, because there's everyday Chinese food that's stranger, and certainly more challenging than grilled scorpions- stinky tofu (looks like charcoal, smells and tastes like cheesy poop), that liver soup (don't know the name), hot Coke boiled with ginger, that pork-skin aspic, the milk-wine pudding, instant noodles with a slice of American cheese, etc.
I'm going to go in with T. and say that jian bing was one of my favorite things. Like a crepe/omlet/cracker/sandwich, with tons of coriander and three mystery sauces. Also, chuan'r, the little shish kebabs you get from Uigyr joints.
My father, who speaks fluent Chinese, and I once passed by a stand in a not-too-touristy street in Guilin (southern China) that was selling some sort of fried creature on a stick. I asked my dad to ask the merchant what it was. "Rat" translated my dad. From expression of disgust on my face, the merchant quickly amended his statement. "Those are not city rats," explained my father, "he says he caught them in the mountains."
To this day I regret not trying those "mountain" rats.
ummmm.......NO
This guy obviously does not travel much outside of the provincial American comfort zones of the world. Didn't everyone get over pics like these in the 80s--or at least, the 90s??
Not to insinuate that everyone has the money to travel exotically, but seriously--this is the typical American cubicle-tool that is making it more and more dangerous for the sophisticated, cutting-edge US travelers to roam the world without being pigeonholed into the scaredy-cat-hick stereotype!
Guys like this should spend less $$ on sneakers and hoodies and more on traveling around the globe. He probably gets scared walking around NYC!
Tobyfee is pretty much right.. another time you will see these kinds of foods, particularly the insects, is during the temple fair time of year when people come in from the outer provinces and set up stands. Scallion pancakes and deep fried bread (kinds of like a non-sweet cruller) are two delicious and easy to find beijing street foods.
Stinky tofu is probably one of the nastiest things you can ever smell, let alone eat, and this is coming from someone who enjoys 10 year+ aged brick cheese made from limburger culture. I ordered it at a sichuanese restaurant in Queens called spicy and tasty (i highly, highly reccomend it for normal, non feces smelling food) and it cleared the room because it stank so bad. It tasted like pooped-out brie cheese, but I still ate about 1/4 of it out of pride. Now my family really can accuse me of wearing a shit eating grin.