Lugares

Gastronomy is one of the main edges of a culture and in many ways this factor helps you understand a foreign idiosyncrasy. I realized that, long after I had been traveling around China.

I went to Guilin, a very known city at the south of China and famous for the shapes of it mountains. When I got off the bus I could felt a penetrating smell in the atmosphere. I then figured out that the smell I had felt for the last weeks was almost the same everywhere and that it was due to the food local people eats. The Chinese diet is full of garlic, soy, and herbal essence. They don`t eat the amount of red meat that we do, instead they eat a lot of fish, and they don't consume milk nor the products that derives from it. Therefore the smell they have differs from the one we have. Is at the south of China were you can eat the strangest kind of meats and food. Even the guide says that they eat everything that has four legs, everything that flies and everything that swims. Is at the South were they eat dogs, but they eat it only in winter. One of the reasons they eat dog meat, is because it consumption rises the blood pressure and this effect warms up people in winter.

It's very common in Chinese restaurants, that as you go inside the restaurant you can see rabbit, rats, frogs, ducks and chickens kept in cages. This way you choose the animal you want to eat.
But with snakes the experience is different. First because they bring the alive serpent to the table, they cut his head off in front of you and immediately afterwards they poured all its blood into a cup. Then they add some liquor and make up a cocktail that you then drink.

Every single day in China I thought about the relation they have with food. I could realize it was their history that determined their behavior towards food. They eat everything they can with no complain; everything that could feed them is food. And this is understandable as soon as you know that many of their population have died from starvation.