Raising a stink

When you’ve had about a thousand years too much civilization, you develop some strange eating habits. That’s what happened to the Chinese. The list of their unusual culinary preferences reads like a buffet menu on Noah’s Ark.

At the insistence of my wife, who is Chinese, I have promised not to mention the really eccentric stuff, like scorpion, dog, and that restaurant in Beijing entirely devoted to male organs of reproduction. So I won’t.

Instead, here are some of the regulars: chicken feet, black fungus, jelly fish, sea cucumber, bird’s nest (the saliva of swifts), century egg (egg cured in tea, wood ash, quicklime and salt), snake, chick fetus cooked in its yolk, fish head, swim bladder, and fermented tofu. And don’t forget that medicine made from a parasitic fungus and the caterpillar that is its home and lunch.

I’ve eaten many things from that inventory, and they’re either pretty good or curiously innocuous. Fermented tofu, affectionately known as stinky tofu, is addicting. If you’ve always wanted to try mixing dark chocolate with Roquefort cheese but never got around to it, just give stinky tofu a try.

Now, you’d think with a palate as varied and courageous as that, your average Chinese citizen could eat and enjoy anything, right? Wrong. In my experience, most of them share a deep repugnance toward Indian food.

On one occasion in Singapore, we had gone out for steamboat (Chinese fondue) with a Chinese friend. When the after-dinner conversation turned to Indian food, a look of mixed fear and disgust came over his face, and he spoke these immortal words: “The thing about Indian food is, you just don’t know what you’re eating!” I wish I had thought to chirp up with, “Hey, wasn’t that pig intestine delicious!”

Now, don’t think I’m beating up the Chinese. I’m beating up Indians too. I’ve never seen a people so cruelly enslaved by their own cuisine. If an Indian doesn’t get curry for two or three days in a row, it’s really not safe to be around him or her. She’ll start to acquire a haunted, crazed look in her darting eyes as she plots who she has to kill to escape from this hell that doesn’t serve Indian food.

You can offer an Indian a choice of 200 of the tastiest dishes from around the world, and they will still ask for their own food, even if the only Indian dish is dal chaval (curried lentils and rice).

Till the last two words, his eyes will be glazing over and his face going slack with resignation. But when he finally picks up the name of that most humble of all Indian meals, he will break into a wide smile, wag his head, and ask for the dal-chaval.

But in multi-cultural Singapore, everything is different. Here, the Chinese love Indian food, and the Indians love…Indian food. And I love it all. It will be a sad day when I run out of new dishes from Singapore’s opulent culinary scene.

To my astonishment, I have even started to like durian, the smell of which I once described as three-days-under-a-hot-sun road kill. Actually, “like” is not the right word. It’s more like indulging a perversion.

Just this evening, I did what I swore to my wife I would never do: under the cover of darkness, I smuggled some durian into the apartment, ran to the open-air nook behind our kitchen, and devoured the flesh around one seed with what I would call guilty and masochistic lust.

With a deviant’s cunning, I then sanitized the scene of the crime. I tossed the gnawed pit down the garbage shoot, and wrapped the rest in 200 plastic bags, stashing them in a deep, dark corner of the fridge.

Now I’ve washed my hands, brushed my teeth, gargled, opened every door and window, and am waiting in a white-knuckled sweat for my wife to come home. Problem is, I keep emitting great, foggy burps of durian. I’m dreading the moment she steps through the door, wrinkles her nose, and says, “What’s that smell?” Then I’ll have to shrug my shoulders and tell the truth: “It’s your stinky tofu.”

Mark Featherstone is a Canadian, and a Professor at the School of Biological Sciences, Nanyang Technological University. He’ll pay you to empty his fridge.