Eating Food That's Still Alive

[Jinmyo]

Oh my god.

cabrales...?

[cabrales]

Jinmyo -- I asked myself whether I would have attempted to take in the newborn mice. It would have been very challenging, but I would attempt.

[Jinmyo]

Wow.

edit:

But I still love you dearly.

[pariah_kerry]

and to think I hired an exterminator when I could have opened a restaurant...

[foodie52]

It's not "eating": it's showmanship. Join a circus for heaven's sake

[cabrales]

foodie52 -- When you have a chance, could you please elaborate on your perceptions of showmanship? For example, if I encountered an opportunity where I could sample the mice (not that I would be actively pursuing them), I would try to take them in to see how the mice would skirt around inside my mouth. (It would make the Iron Chef "danced inside my mouth" references take on a new meaning). I would not be doing it for showmanship, but rather to experience the movement aspects and the thrill of a proximity between the eater and the eaten. However, I appreciate that the mice might be unpalatable to some members.

Russ -- Nina W and I recently sampled live orange and hokki clams at Sushi Hatsu in New York. Below is the link:

http://forums.egullet.org/ibf/index.php?ac...355e2c3693d4926

[cabrales]

Cabrales, I have eaten the very-nearly-live octopus in South Korea mentioned in the article you provided.  It was slices of a tentacle, rather than a whole small beast, part of a range of right-outta-the-tank sashimi.

I remember our hosts advising thorough and quick chewage, lest the suction cups adhere to one's esophagus.  It was very chewy, chewier even than the cooked octopus one commonly finds at sushi bars.

Chang-Rae Lee mentions live octupus sampled by other diners in Seoul during the summer of 1980, in his article "Sea Urchin" in the New Yorker Food Issue:

"A young couple sitting at the end of the bar oder live octupus. The old woman nods and hooks one in the tank. It's fairly small, the size of a hand. She lays it on a board and quickly slices off the head with her cleaver. She chops the tentacles and gathers them up onto a plate, dressing them with sesame oil and a spicy bean sauce. 'You have to be careful,' my father whispers, 'or one of the suction cups can stick inside your throat. You could die.' The lovers blithely feed each other the sectioned tentacles, taking sips of soju in between."

[Sandra Levine]

However, I appreciate that the mice might be unpalatable to some members. 

I wonder how they would compare to cuy.

[mikeczyz]

There is no way in hell i could eat a live mammal. Octopus, squid, clams, all that stuff is fair game. A mouse is where i draw the line.

mike

[201]

It's not "eating": it's showmanship. Join a circus for heaven's sake

I have to agree on this showmanship theory. I can't imagine raw mice actually tasting very good unless one is starving to death.

One time on a fishing trip I cut open a small fish (using pliers and a butter knife, no less!) to use as bait for larger ones. In the process of doing this, I extracted the little heart which continued to beat as I held it in the pliers. I don't even like eating fish, but I ate the beating fish heart just for the experience and the story to tell.

It's a good thing that's all I expected out of it, because while it wasn't very tasty, the story is now here for the ages of eGullet to come.

[cabrales]

Since my last post in this thread, I have sampled (1) glistening eggs pulled from a live lobster (the little clumps are not as readily dislodged as one might imagine), and (2) over a dozen live shrimp, many of whose whiskers still moved after I had separated the head from the body and as I was taking in the shrimp flesh. Both were sampled in France; the latter, as I sat with a bottle of $5 white wine by the seashore.

Thanks for Soba's post in another thread, which reminded me to post the above.

[Jon Tseng]

I've done the whole live shrimp thing in sichuan.

They're little critter so you eat 'em whole. The secret is to chomp down before they start wriggling in your mouth. Having said that they're heavily soused in chillis and rice wine, so I suspect they're fair insensate by the time it comes round to supper...

Taste like shrimp, chilli and vodka, unsurprisingly. Good beer snacks.

J

PS Is it the being alive which shocks people or the still moving? Suspect the latter, hence the social acceptability of oysters

[cabrales]

The shrimp I had were jumping around and hard to get hold of. They might have had greater "intelligence"/"perceptive abilities" than their small little brain areas might suggest, because some would not move (pretending to be dead, I guess) when I picked them up and yet would move quite a bit once I had let go of them. The shrimps' shell were slippery.

[Suzanne F]

So which is "worse" (i.e., more inhumane, less PC, whatever): eating the shrimp "live" or drowning them in Shao Xing and then cooking and eating them? Tearing apart live lobsters, or plunging them whilst alive into boiling water? (I worked with a sushi assistant who would apologize to the lobsters first.) Is it even a moral question at all, or just one of how do we feed ourselves with what is available to us?

[Wilfrid]

I am fairly hardy, but I am not sure I like things wriggling in my mouth.

Except hamsters, of course.

[cabrales]

Volume 21-09 of Food & Beverages International contains GraceAnn Walden's Chefs' Chat column on "What is the Strangest Thing You have Ever Eaten?". Gloria Ciccarone-Nehls of Huntington Hotel's Big 4 restaurant (SF) noted:

"The first strange taste that comes to mind would be live eels (elvers) in Costa Rica, barely cooked so that when you swallow, you can still feel them slithering down your throat."

[awbrig]

cab, check out HEAT in CHicago when you are in town...

[cabrales]

Bourdain describes his experience in Vietnam of eating the heart of a snake (cobra?) while it (at least the heart) is still beating a bit.  It was taken with some type of wine, among other things (?). Does that count?

Volume 21-09 of Food & Beverage International contains an article entitled "Scaly Offerings of the Night and Other Famous Specialties of Huong Rung Restaurant", by Garrett Culhane. In an explicit series of photographs, the taking in a cobra's heart is depicted.

"The waiter quickly returns with one hand holding the tail of a 6-foot Indian cobra. It's [sic] head writhing about the floor only a few feet from our table. . . . With enviable calm, our snake handler grabs for the head, misses, tries again, then quickly pulls back, dodging the striking cobra. Again, he reaches out. Now the serpent is held firmly from both ends. Two more men arrive. One grabs the middle of teh thrashing serpent, while another cuts into the underbelly and pulls out the palpitating heart. A glass if placed below to catch the crimson flow. Then, with the snip of a scissors, the thumb-sized pump is severed and passed to a small dish and set upon our table. The reptile's blood is mixed with rice wine and set near the *still-beating heart*. Richard, in deliberation, reaches for the small dish and down his gullet goes the heart, followed by a shot of vinous warm blood . . . . 'You can feel it beating all the way to the bottom of your belly,' says Richard."

The restaurant: Huong Rung 2 Restaurant, 146 Hai Ba Trung, P. Da Kao -- Quan 1, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietname. Other indicative menu items: barbequed turtle dove, grilled field mouse (these are roughly $0.80 each), roasted toad, Indian cobra prepared eight ways (not necessarily all ordered; $26/kg -- shredded salad, minced with rice paper, braised with lemongrass, viscera sauteed with onions, stewed, mined rolled with the leaf of something, with mung bean rice gruel, braised with ginger), three flavored bat ($5), five flavored lizard ($2.50).

[cabrales]

cab, check out HEAT in CHicago when you are in town...

awbrig -- How's your baby doing? Could you describe the restaurant a bit?

[awbrig]

Liam is doing awesome...heres his first day in this world...thx for asking!

http://www.infantxpress.com/depot/20043/an...uncement/002905

I am really surprised you dont know about Heat! Let me find you some info there is tons!

[awbrig]

here is my friend, Phil Vettel of the CHicago Tribune, review of Heat,

http://metromix.com/top/1,1419,M-Metromix-...l-11792,00.html

[cabrales]

awbrig -- Thanks I vaguely recall a restaurant like Heat being featured in a FN program earlier this year.

[nervousnelli]

I had some of that "live" cobra heart when I was in SE Asia and I did not feel it beating as it traveled from my mouth to my belly. How did that rumor get started?

[cabrales]

nervousnelli -- While I have never sampled the cobra heart, I guess not all specimens have the "beating" effect. When you have a chance, please consider describing your experiences with this item in SE Asia (including the restaurant where the item was taken in, if applicable).