My
granddaughter eats chickens’ feet! Doesn’t that demonstrate just how diverse we
have become as a family? Not really.
I have
never eaten a chicken’s foot. I cannot readily think of a more revolting snack
even if I try: rats’ ears perhaps or boiled toenails of an aged person maybe.
But chickens’ feet disgust me. They are horny and clawed and have spent most of
their lives scratching around in offal, or worse. There cannot be much meat on
them so people who do eat them present a nibbling, ratty like appearance as
they consume. The whole thing is quite revolting, but it is very popular.
And yet,
people eat a lot of chickens, According to the Vegetarian Calculator the
average person in the USA consumes 2,400 chickens during their lives. That’s
4,800 feet which, if not consumed, are wasted. Surely that’s not good for the
planet!
When I kept
pigs I read a lot about them. One of the anecdotal stories suggested that a
farmer’s wife could use every bit of a pig bar its grunt. It was a silly
statement because dead pigs do not grunt, but you take the point. My daughter
had a taste for pigs’ trotters, though I always suspected she ate them for
effect rather than satisfaction and I can at least excuse this indulgence since
there is considerably more meat on a pig’s trotter than a chicken’s foot.
Many people
in the world eat insects and in China we saw a great variety of exoskeletal treats
proffered at market stalls. I did not try them because I do not like them, even
though I have not tried them. In Cambodia I watched a young lady vending grubs.
I did not see anyone buying them, but she liked them. Every minute or so her
hand strayed towards her display, plucked a nice fat grub and popped it into
her month and then munched contentedly. The grubs were rather fat, like overfed
maggots – and so was she.
There’s
more on the insectivores. This blog has led to the discovery that my
daughter-in-law is partial to the odd insect. With certain conditions she has
allowed me to include a photograph of her munching a scorpion. At first I
thought the creature was floating towards her willing mouth, but if you look
closely you will see that the creature is on a stick – like a lollipop or
scorpionpop.
When I was
a boy we used to go levering. Elvers, I’m sure you know, are baby eels. To
catch them we had first to dig up lots of worms. Then we, rather cruelly, sowed
the worms onto threads, tied then all together in clumps and finally to a
weight: this we attached to a stout rod with a strong cord. We then went forth
to the Pill, a tributary of the River Severn, at the correct season of the year
and dangled our worm clumps into the freshwater inlets that attracted the baby
eels. They would hook their mouths onto the worms and we would lift them out
and wipe them off into a bucket, time and time again. Might it have been
simpler and equally nutritious, I now wonder, to eat the worms?
Back home
my Mum would fry the elvers for breakfast and they were rather nice. Oddly, whilst
writing this piece I picked up a BBC article with the headline: “Illegal elvers
worth more than caviar on black market”. We could have been rich! And in a way
we were, we also ate adult eels and flatfish that we caught and moorhens eggs
that we stole from their nests, always leaving two behind. My mother always
claimed that I and two other boys had eaten a dead seagull during one summer
holiday. I have no recollection of that, but we were all three seriously ill
later that year, missing almost a year’s schooling.
It is said
that you are what you eat and I feel happier being part elver than I could ever
feel about being part chicken foot. But what else can be done with the feet of
so many chickens that are killed to provide Sunday roasts and chicken cutlets.
I have a solution. When we had a small holding I killed our chickens as
humanely as I could, then plucked them and removed their feet exposing the ligaments
that had given the chicken control of its leg movements. I then chased our
children around the farm whilst pulling on a ligament so that the foot seemed
to be grabbing them. It was something to do. The chicken did not mind. It had
passed into chicken heaven where its legs were extra long and fat edible grubs
grew plentifully on trees.
(P.S. My
son claims that he and I once did eat a chicken’s foot in Taiwan for a dare. I
have no recollection of that and may have been drinking that country’s chicken
soup laced with very strong rice wine at the time.)
