My own junk food

 

Bugs, lambs, locusts, dogs, goats, worms, ants, bee larvae, centipedes, cockroaches, crickets, chickens, dragonflies, houseflies, rats, grasshoppers, junebugs, crocodiles, scorpions, stinkbugs, sheep, tarantulas, serpents, termites, pigs, snails, frogs, rabbits, fish, horses and, of course, cows are all good to eat. Or, as the people of Valencia would say, you can cook a paella with each one of these ingredients.

Maybe you can find in this list something you don’t like to eat or that you even find repulsive. Probably, if you don’t like them it is because you haven’t tried them yet. Or maybe you haven’t travelled too much. Travelling gives you the opportunity to taste this kind of food; so you can eat insects, little animals and different meat you usually do not eat by travelling to Asia, Africa and even Europe.

What people eat depends on many factors. Marvin Harris says that preferences and avoidances in a diet obey a rule of costs and benefits. So, for instance, insect eating and insect aversion in the diet can be explained by economic and historical factors. Societies which do not have large animals available for food eat insects. Dogs are more useful for Americans as pets than as flesh but for some Chinese people dogmeat is a good source of proteins. Or, at least, it has been.

Food taboos appear when the society tries to avoid food that could be expensive or difficult to produce, ineffective for nourishing people or unhealthy for them considering the external conditions of life; not for the quality of the food itself. Nevertheless, nowadays globalization can bring us insects to eat as a fashionable meal. This way we can try, for instance, fried bugs and see they are in fact very tasty, and acquire a taste for insects and similar kinds of foods.

  

In other words, what we consider good to eat is what we can get easily in our environment or what we can produce at a good cost-benefit ratio. This way, each culture makes good to eat what is, simply, available and makes bad what is unsuitable. So, if you don’t like insects it is only because you live in a place were big mammals are ready to be eaten. However, if you really don’t want eat insects, clean your salad carefully before eating it and close your mouth firmly when you ride a bike. Insects are everywhere.

But, I don’t have to look for insects or dogflesh to get my own favourite source of fat and protein. If you ask me about the food I prefer I would say to you without hesitating: Offal is my favourite food, my own local junk food. I love sweetbreads, gizzards, tripe, testicles, brain, trotters, head, tongue, kidney, liver, nose, maws, spleen and lung from my favourite mammals.

Offal is good to eat. In some places, people shy away from offal as food, while others make it into delicacies like foie gras and sweetbreads. In some countries, offal is even a national dish, such as haggis in Scotland or callos in Spain.

You can eat well in several places, like in Valladolid or Valencia, for instance. But, and this is my proposal to you, don’t be shy and come with me on a tripe tour of Madrid, an offal land. For sure we will have a good time.

Bart Ptolomy