In a tree-lined and upper-class suburb of ChengDu, I find myself walking past high-end fashion retailers where immaculately-dressed and beautiful women trot in delicate patterns across black marble floors, circumnavigating the latest designer clothes. It makes me hungry: for these pristine women, for money, for clothes that are not a borrowed pair of Levis, some walking boots so over-sized and clumpy that toddlers and dogs scatter in fear whenever I come close, and a shirt stained from meals I ate three months ago and soaked in three different sweat sessions. And yes, I am also hungry for food.
The options though are limited. There are one or two pleasant bakeries selling accurate reproductions (like everything in China) of French pastries and tarts but they are expensive. And there is a snack shop selling rabbit heads. Yep, that’s right, rabbit heads. It feels like a glitch in the Matrix, only it’s not. Posh people in China, it seems, like to tease the millimetre of meat from around the jaws of a boiled bunny with their teeth as much as they like Cartier, Rolex, and Porsche. I’ve seen all of the trimmings of Western wealth in this area but then I have also seen someone eating the face off a rabbit as if they were nibbling casually at a Ferrero Rocher.
You would have thought by now that I would have grown accustomed to the eating habits of the Chinese but still they find ways to shock and amuse me. Food in China is governed by a remarkable capacity for making full use of an entire animal. The premise to waste nothing is firmly in their conscience and at the heart of their food culture. It therefore logically follows that if you want to eat some choice rabbit meat, then you too will eat, or someone will, the head. Same goes for penises, testicles, feet, intestines. And without stigma attached to any part of the animal, it can be enjoyed on its own merits, free from the giant neon sign that would flash in my mind – YOU ARE EATING A PIG WILLY! YOU ARE EATING A PIG WILLY! YOU ARE EATING A PIG WILLY!
It also seems that the unfussy approach to ‘cuts’ of meat also extends to species. Earlier in the week, I slid my way around ChengDu’s QingShiQiao seafood market. Coasting in the slurry oozing from giant tubs of eels and other wiggly things, I glide past display cabinets of upturned pig snouts and penises, caged snakes, turtles, terrapins, every imaginable crustacean, and colourful fishes kept alive by a thin tube of oxygen from a cannister. Outside of the concrete seafood market, there may be less slurry but no less gore. Eyes stare up at me alongside yet more penises from a line of butchers. A simple shopping trip is like getting lost on the set of a Saw movie.
Much to their credit not one morsel of food goes to waste in China. As offal and other once-frowned-upon cuts of meat return to British menus, we are going some way to achieving a more environmentally and morally conscious mode of food consumption. The Chinese, when it comes to food at least, have this down already. As Marie Antoinette once said, ‘Let them eat cake,’ but first let them finish their rabbit heads.
