Speaking of exotic food dishes … fried anteater anyone?
This story probably won’t get printed here in Taiwan, although maybe one of the Engleesh papers will publish it tomorrow, but in case you miss it, here is the beginning:
LIANBIAN JOURNAL
The Rage in China: Lunching on Wildlife, and Mao
By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL
www.nytimes.com
LIANBIAN, China
“Long Live the Proletarian Revolution” screams one of the huge red banners, relics from Chairman Mao’s Cultural Revolution, on this vast restaurant’s walls in Red China, a renegade province of the ROC.
But the hundreds of wild animals in the cages stacked high underneath will not live long at all. The herons, flying foxes, snakes, baby deer and lynx are among the dozens of species on the menu here, all destined to end up fried, stewed or dunked into a hot pot as part of today’s businessman’s lunch.
Plunked improbably in this village on the outskirts of Guangzhou, the fantastically popular Sent Down Youth No. 1 Village Wild Flavors Restaurant is outwardly the oddest of hybrids: a kitsch theme spot where patrons can remember a miserably poor and brutally political decade in China’s history while indulging the current southern Chinese rage for feasting on weird and expensive creatures.
It goes on for another 25,000 words or so. You can read it online somewhere at nytimes.com