Chinese Delicacies - Not for the Squeamish

One day I was watching television when I turned on a National Geographic program filmed from a remote mountainous region in China, the southwest province of Guizhou. The indigenous people that lived there were whipping together a delicacy in honor of special guests who had come to visit - the journalists and cameramen on location to film their culture. In their honor, the locals were preparing a local delicacy - Guizhou Dong hot pot. 

Hot pot originated in China and consists of a steaming broth in a hot pot brazier placed in the center of the dining table along with plates of raw meats and seafood, leafy vegetables, tofu, dumplings, noodles, mushrooms and more, which are then individually selected and placed in the hot pot, cooked, removed and eaten. There are dozens of varieties on hot pot and they are a staple at any Chinese restaurant.  

Some might ask why the Chinese eat such vile things, but like other countries in Asia, they have experienced starvation and one way to counter starvation is to eat absolutely anything that has a head and legs and every part of it. Alternatively, meat handling processes in the west would leave many dry-heaving, swearing off meat forever. 

The preparation for Guizhou hot pot is quite a different process from your standard hot pot. First, a large bull had been selected and it took a number of men to push and pull the struggling beast from his pen in order to pin him down to the ground and immobilize him. Perhaps the bull sensed his fate when with bulging eyes he stared up at the man wielding the razor sharp knife. After his throat was slit, a few of the locals ran for extra buckets in order to catch the blood as it gushed and spurted from the animal’s neck, the bull wheezing, thrashing and snorting, his struggle growing weaker and weaker before he finally fell back in exhaustion to his death. After all the blood had drained, the men heaved the enormous animal on to its side, it's legs stiffer than the legs on a wooden coffee table. They peeled and sliced the skin off with long, sharp knives, hacking the legs off before carving large slabs of meat from its body.

After carving up the beef and sectioning it off, they put the meat into large vats and minced it, pounding and thrashing and pulverizing the meat with long reeds, stopping only long enough to add fresh blood when it dried. They did this for hours in order to tenderize the meat, using all the blood in the process. When it finally had the appearance of ground up hamburger meat, they inspected it and nodded and  agreed that it was ready. A large mound, a round paddy was formed from some of the meat and placed in the center of a large plate and placed at the center of the dining table. The entrée was ready.

For the next stage, the contents of the bull’s colon were removed by hand, the camera graphically showing the cook’s arm reaching into the torn anus of the bull and hooking out feces that was green and grassy. Most animals graze on grass in central China, so it was a green mush which was thoroughly mixed with the bull’s urine. The cook then pressed this into a fresh mound, along with a few spices, and put it on a plate beside the mound of meat already on the table. I never caught what spices they used. According to the website GoGomate Travel, "Guizhou cow dung hot pot does not really contain animal poop. The cow dung actually refers to a special beef intestine made by the Dong people of Guizhou." That may be so, but perhaps that's another variation on the meal.

The journalists got some wonderful takes of an extended family enjoying the meal served on long tubular reeds, but there were no shots of the guys sitting down with the family to partake of this particular Guizhou delicacy. Perhaps they weren't hungry.