Offals and Spaghetti

When I began kindergarten my front teeth were missing and my two sharp incisors framed the vacant space at the front of my mouth. I entered kindergarten looking like a curly headed vampire. This past Thanksgiving I decided to end my days of vegetarianism as my vampire teeth seemed to be consistently longing to rip meat. I decided that what I was really against was factory meat and not the actual act of eating animals. I decided to eat meat I knew the background of and spruced up my diet with turkey from a nearby farm and the occasional hamburger from cows near my relatives in Vermont. Though I technically was not a vegetarian, I ended up not eating all that much meat. Coming to Malawi I figured besides a few frozen chickens imported from South Africa, most meat is local and hasn’t made a huge carbon footprint or impeded on anyone’s livelihood as factories are known to do. Once I established this for myself I have to say all of a sudden I felt so much less restriction in my diet, it left me giddy. All of a sudden huge portions of menus I would have normally bypassed were now open and waiting for my order. Of course I don’t really go to restaurants here, but when I have, I have found chicken burgers with cheese and chips quite amazing and beef with rice so beyond a sole protein and starch. Even though I don’t know what I will choose to eat back in the states, since I have opened myself up to the world of meat I find myself fantasizing about MacDonald’s cheeseburgers, and all those menu halves back in the states I didn’t even look at. It’s as if my teeth have been activated and are now signally to my brain that corporate burgers of injustice or not, the meat eating cannot end any time soon. I have been ok with this. During training I felt better when I could eat a chicken I killed, I felt I was doing my part to jive along with the cycle of life. I felt bad ass when my community remarked that the volunteer before me only ate soy pieces. I could tell them I would eat anything. I had left my sometimes flaky east coast vegetarian self behind, left her with tofu and peanut sauce atop pizza in a tiny hole in the wall in Harvard Square. That is up until now.

Yesterday a friend of mine hosted me at her home for a birthday lunch as today on my actual birthday I had to travel to the bank due to some irresponsible budgeting and loss of wallet issues. She said she wanted to make meat and rice and that I should make something I liked to eat in America. I thought I had steered clear of disaster when I told her not to cook the spaghetti with rice, my choice of favorite dishes. I was planning on adding the meat to my spaghetti and having spaghetti with fresh basil, garlic, parmesan cheese from a package, and Malawian meat. It sounded pretty good for a b-day meal. Apparently my new “now I am a hard core vampire meat eater” attitude had to be put to the test, however. My host after settling me into her house with tea and buns, joyously brought out a leg of a cow exclaiming that she would cook this and we would have cow leg, offals (often liver, but sometimes tongue, heart pieces, etc. of animal) and rice. The leg of cow had a nice hoof and a thick coating of hide. Ok, fine that’s where it comes from, I can do this, and it’s not all that different from the chicken. She plopped the leg on the fire and continually rotated it scraping of the cow hide and hair as it charred to black burn. She then proceeded to hack at the leg with a giant ax. The leg would go bouncing off the dirtied sack she had placed it on, onto the ground. She would laugh, I would laugh and the hacking continued with only slight stomach lurches. Eventually the leg was in small enough pieces so that she could saw at it with a knife. At this point her son intrigued with the flying, burning, hacking, and sawing of the hoof and leg decided to express his intrigue by continually touching the meat his mother cut. I tried hard to block out memories of him touching his butt, his snot, mouth, and who knows what else and concentrated on the spaghetti. And soon everything was cooked. On my plate was a huge mound of rice, spongy meat pieces, cabbage, and my spaghetti with basil and cheese. I instantly regretting using my sacred cheese and garlic powder as I watched spaghetti mix with rice and liver and flashes of legless cows danced in my mind. I have tried offal three times now, and feel that I have given it a chance. I don’t like it. The pieces are spongy, soft, chewy, and not that flavorful. I don’t know why the softness is a problem, but coupled with the spongyness, it feels as if you are eating meat that has been trampled on or worked over by greasy fingers, there is no ripping of teeth needed and in fact my entire mouth wasn’t really into the whole “eating offals” process. But I had to eat it, it was my birthday lunch. Garlicky, spongy, softness, in a mess of rice had to disappear, at least most of it. At this point in the meal I remembered a story my mother had frequently told about a friend of hers who had been offered a salad in some country where as a foreigner she had been urge to only eat cooked vegetables. She ate the salad anyway and ended up alright. Thinking back on the story I couldn’t help but think this woman had been relatively lucky on many accounts and I realized I would give bagfuls of offals to get just one salad, washed, pre-washed or not. The offals were chewy and the overwhelming garlicness of the spaghetti didn’t really go with the vision of cow leg rolled in dirt and child spitsnotsweat. Chewing was difficult. Rather, chewing without giving into the gag reflex was difficult. There were also pieces of meat that looked like hairy sponges… must swallow and proceed. At the end of the meal I had to run off to an HIV/AIDS education/drama program I was helping run and I had to leave my host to finish the meal. I left my host, my bad ass meat eating-ness, and may or may not have left pieces of offal under carefully constructed heaps of rice. Wanting to throw up chewy meat sponge with spaghetti rice cabbage fusion, I have never longed so much for tofu with peanut sauce atop a multi-grain pizza crust…ever.