Eating the Donkey

I did not trick her into eating donkey meat, exactly. It was late. She was hungry. She was weary from walking all day, something this 11-year-old all-American girl was not in the habit of doing. I assured her that spaghetti with meat sauce would be just the thing to perk her up. It was only after placing the order that I mentioned that the meat in question might be different than what we have at home. Might be from an animal she’d never eaten before. An animal she might consider “cute.”
She raised her eyebrow weakly. I held my breath and waited for the whining. “Seriously?” she said, with all the cynical sass she could muster. But she was weak. “Whatever. I’m starving.”
Her sister looked on in horror as she devoured every meaty noodle on her plate.
Because I just can’t let a sleeping dog (or a dead donkey) lie, after dinner I pushed the girls to think about why it seemed weird to us that Italians would eat donkey. Why should donkey be any different than cow or pig, both of which are so prevalent in the American diet? The girls took this idea and ran with it. Instead of dreading the unknown at mealtime, they began to seek it out.
They were delighted with the separate courses of pasta, meat, and vegetables at lunch and dinner, even at a truck stop on the highway, and imagined the chaos that would present in their school cafeteria back home. In Piemonte, they were surprised that a large tray of lardo, prosciutto, and other cured meats appeared at every meal. In Turin, they declared the chocolately bicerin to be the only acceptable form of coffee.
When we got home I asked them about what they had learned on their first trip to a foreign country. “I guess it was when I ate donkey meat and I realized it wasn’t so bad,” said one. “Yeah, you know, how they eat different stuff but for them it’s normal,” added the other.
It was just what I hoped they would learn on the road: that “normal” is different everywhere. My little girls had become travelers.