Forbidden foods

We have come a long way since the 1970s towards a monotonous meat diet where we eat hardly anything other than chicken and beef, and to a lesser degree, pork. Forget about rabbits, venison and swans. Disney’s Bambi Complex has taken hold of the American imagination and has culturally banned most of the meats that were commonly consumed a half century ago.

A lot of the foods mentioned in the article are banned in the United States for a variety of reasons, the weirdest being that junk food makes a mess in schools. Cadbury’s chocolate, once much better than Hershey’s, really sucks, no great loss. 

Most, if not all, French cheese is made from unpasteurized milk—the French don’t seem to have a problem with the concept. But we do. True, during the 1940s, before the invention penicillin, people could get TB from unpasteurized milk. My uncle was one of them. But now, you can pick up TB in a homeless camp. So banning unpasteurized milk products that are rigorously tested in France, is somewhat draconian. 

Horsemeat is not illegal to eat in the United States. It is illegal to import it. The butcher in Ross, California was selling horsemeat all through the 1970s. And yes, I’ve eaten it, to my horror, as I was completely horse crazy. But it tasted good. Because horsemeat is no longer popular the abattoirs are not set up to deal with horsemeat. The slaughterhouses that were used to process horsemeat went of business. You can still eat horsemeat in Canada and Mexico.

You could also order bearmeat, venison, and elkmeat from that same Ross butcher. And FYI, Julia Child was a boarder at the Branson School. No correlation that I know of, but she became a champion of French cuisine—cheese, paté, various meats. Sea turtle was on Mexican menus last time I was there.

Haggis, with or without lights, is quite good. It’s kind of like a pate. And the reason why you can’t get real haggis in the United States because of the lights, again, the United States import business is not set up for the concept. But the industrious Scots waste nothing, and use up the entire sheep including the baaa. And some real Italian salami is made from donkeymeat. Any imported cured but uncooked meat is banned in the US. 

Tell the Conch Nation they can’t eat conch. They sure didn’t get the memo in the Florida Keys.

Sushi is a grey zone. Mugu, if prepared wrong, will kill you. But that is another story.