Increases the bookmark digg Google Delicious buzz friendfeed Linkedin diigo stumbleupon Qzone QQ Microblog Imagine walking down Beijing's famous pedestrian street of Wangfujing. On one side there are storefronts lined with luxury goods to attract tourists, while on the other side you see skewered scorpions, fried tofu dipped in suspicious-looking sauce and diced chunks of pig lung floating in soup. How does the sight of food from China's wild culinary side make you feel?
Foreigners are often perplexed by the types of food Chinese eat. We eat intestines, bugs, stinky foods, blood tofu and whatever else you can imagine. In South China's Guangdong Province, a place famous for its crazy (or delicious, depending on how you look at it) cuisine, there's an old saying that Guangdong people will eat "anything with legs but a table and anything that flies but an airplane."
It might seem grotesque to some people, but Chinese have a talent for making what seems inedible delicious. We eat weird foods not because we are barbarians, but because of a deeper historical reason.
Take luzhu (boiled pork entrails), for example. This famous soup, which has intestines, lungs and pieces of fat, is commonly slurped in Beijing.
Our proud culinary tradition of not wasting any animal part comes from the old days, when people couldn't have enough to eat. Luzhu is a food of the common folk who lacked enough money to pay for whole pieces of meat. All many of them could get their hands on were entrails and fat, which led them to create now-famous dishes using these previously shunned ingredients.
The same applies for blood tofu, snakes, bugs and other "suspicious-looking" animal organs. Despite being left with the food scraps of the rich, common folk made signature dishes out of limited ingredients that continue to satisfy stomachs today.
There is nothing barbaric or embarrassing about history and customs. I quite enjoy such "odd" dishes. Even if they don't please my taste buds, I never show surprise or disgust. Foods are connected to cultures, and we should all show some respect to how people lived during difficult times.
What I have found through my travels, however, is that the "weird food" phenomenon isn't exclusive to China.
When I studied in Denmark as an exchange student during college, my host family often served on the dinner table a weird yet delicious food called leverpostej, or liver paste, which is a spread made of pig liver often smeared on rye bread.
The Korean restaurant down the road from my home serves sausages laced with pig blood.
Many people like sushi nowadays, but the idea of raw fish is weird to some people. The Japanese also eat raw eggs. And speaking of raw foods, the West has a delicacy called steak tartare made of raw beef.
I don't think any of these foods are weird. What you consider "weird" might be a delicacy in others' eyes. What we ought to do is applaud the genius of people who make what might seem unbearable foods palatable or, dare I say, delicious.
The ideas expressed are those of the author alone, and do neither represent the position of the Global Times nor People's Daily Online.
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