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I prefer my dinners dead
READ on if you dare. This is a true confession of mass murder. I was sitting innocently at a banquet table at the Fai Seafood Hotpot restaurant in Jaffe Road, Hong Kong, when the waiter walked into the room and plonked down a large platter.
Your columnist was about to toast his host, who was celebrating his release from jail, when I saw out of the corner of my eye that all the items on the dish were writhing. Eww!
We'd been served a large plate of live prawns on skewers. Each one was waving its tiny arms at me as if to say, "Don't eat me.” And since each had vast numbers of limbs, there was an awful lot of heartbreaking waving gone on.
My appetite vanished. Honestly. Is it too much for a guy to ask that his food be at least dead by the time it is on his plate?
Pretending to have an urgent call to make, I stepped away from the table to phone my friend Sara, an animal lover, and ask her advice. "Rescue them," she hissed. "Grab them and run towards the nearest body of water."
I explained that they would have
difficulty swimming away. "What about the skewers?" I asked. She said: "Remove the skewers unless they are running through important major organs."
1 told her that the skewers ran all the way from their tails to their heads: "Do heads count as important major organs?" She thought for a moment before replying: "Yes, in all species except supermodelsand Fox TV viewers."
Sara said the skewers were a problem that might make saving them impossible. The prawns would need to be anaesthetised before having them extracted at the same time as their tiny severed nerves were sewn together by micro-surgeons. After that, they would need lengthy programs of rehabilitation
and occupational therapy.
Does the Society for the Protection of Animals provide such a service? I suspect the answer, shockingly, is no. Would my family health insurance cover this? It was arguable at best.
Would ambulances respond to a call to aid a distressed seafood appetiser? This also could not be guaranteed.
I got off the phone and returned to the table. After sitting in horrified indecision for another minute, I realised that there was only one thing to do. I grabbed the whole lot arid dumped them into a large dish of hot soup. Death followed swiftly
My squeamishness is not shared by most people. The other diners at the table, including a 16-year-old girl, did
not blink at the horror story unfolding before us. A quick trawl of the internet showed lots of happy tales of people eating live seafood.
The following morning I confessed my actions to Sara.
"You murderer," she said, and forwarded me a recent news report about a Danish TV reporter who was successfully prosecuted for killing 11 fish.ThankGod 1 live in Asia. Seafood diners have never been successfully prosecuted on this side of tiie world.
In contrast, Westerners take their affection for sea food to extremes. In the US, there is a campaign to stop a Seattle tradition in which fishmongers throw dead fish and lobsters to each other
across a fish market. US animal rights campaigners are up in arms, complaining that being hurled across the room is not good for the dignity of the deceased seafood items.
Normally I side with animal lovers, but I'm not enthusiastic about this cause. In myopinion, once items of food are on my plate, the bulk of their dignity has already departed.
Now, if the Americans could be persuaded to send a few micro-surgeons with experience in rehabilitating injured crustaceans over to Asia, those we could make use of.
To know more about exotic sea food visit our columnist at www vittachi com