Cruel Culinary "Art"

Well, this is to continue the topic about the mysterious customs of the past and the present… Sometimes, thanks to the dissimilarity of traditions and mentality, different nations think differently about the good and the bad, about the moral values. So, for example, it is commonly supposed that people from the Asian region are more tend to be cruel, but the thing is they don’t consider this cruelty as something cruel at all. We are not talking about the Mongolian excoriation tradition or Chinese “limbing into thousands pieces”, we’ll discuss the culinary cruelty. It is well-known, that people in different countries eat different kind of food and, of course, differently cook it.

So, in China a tortoise soup is considered to be a big dainty. First of all, they put the tortoise on its back into the hot water and give it a tea spoon with the water to drink every 10 minutes for two hours, and after that they give it a tea spoon with the vegetable oil, so it chokes and dies. But the Chinese say, the soup comes out very delicious.
In Japan and Korea, people are really fond of eating live octopuses.  Right in front of all the restaurant customers, a cook takes a little octopus out from the water, pierces it through, then quickly rolls its palpus onto the stick, dips it into the spicy sauce and gives to the customer. It is very dangerous to eat such kind of octopus, because the chances that incorrectly rolled octopus may spread its palpus and make its “eater” choke are really high. But the customers are always ready to take the risk.
  You can still try fresh monkey brain in the Southern provinces of China, in Vietnam and Philippines. For 2 weeks they give a monkey alcohol to drink, so its brain gains “special aroma and taste”.  Right before eating, they burn its tongue with little hot-iron shovel, so the monkey cannot scream and then they secure its head in a special hole and beat it with a special hammer so the blood goes straight into the brain and finally, they make a particular cut with the scalpel and remove the parietal bone.  So, the customers just need to get a spoon and start eating…

But before cooking an animal, you have to catch it and different nations use their own ways to do it.  So, for example, Chukchi Peninsula indigenes, in spite of the prohibition to hunt are still bagging polar bears. But, the polar bear is the biggest representative of the terrestrial predators and it is quite aggressive, so it’s not easy to catch him. That’s why Eskimo people invented their special way. So, they fill a big bucket with the seal’s blood, put a double-edged knife there so, that its handle is outside, and then they freeze it.  When the “bloody ice-cream” is ready, they bury it with its handle down away from the yurta and wait.  The polar bear has a very good nose and can smell the blood miles away. They do adore seals, as well. Attracted by the smell of the blood, a bear comes to that “prepared” place and starts licking the frozen blood. So it licks and licks and its tongue freezes loses its sensibility. The knife cuts its tongue, however, the bear doesn’t feel anything but the fresh blood smell, so it continues to lick even more passionately and sinks its teeth into the icicle. Finally, the bear faints because of the blood loss and people can easily kill it.
There is a saying among the gourmets: “If there were no culinary art, a cruelty of the reality would be unbearable”. But it seems that sometimes the culinary cruelty breaks all the records. It is a great pity, though…