Patricia sells roasted sheep heads for a living. Since she was 15, she has sat from morning till past dusk at a little table on a street corner in Cape Town’s Langa township. In conversation, she is articulate, and displays a wicked sense of humour, as when she uses the glowing language of beauty product advertisements to describe the white paste she has slathered on her face to stave off the effects of the fires burning behind her. She seems happy to explain the processes and economics of the sheep head market.
Why heads? Obviously because they are cheap, and the people in the neighbourhood poor. Once the heads are purchased, the wool is burned off, then the brains removed from the skulls, and what remains placed on a fire again, before being split down the middle so the whole is held together by an easily severed piece of skin. Customers can order half a head or an entire one.
“But why do you get rid of the brain?” I ask. “It’s my favourite variety of offal.”
“I know many people eat brain,” she replies dismissively, “but we throw it away, maybe feed it to the dogs. We eat the eyes and the cheeks. Of course, the tongue is the best part.”
The quest for protein
There seems no taboo against eating brain, as far as I can tell, just a dislike for the organ shared by the whole community. What a waste of good protein and fat. We Indians know a thing or two about that, having taken the shunning of good protein to extremes. It’s not just cows I’m thinking about when I say that, but also dogs. Consider how many recorded famines India has suffered in the past few centuries. Through it all, the pariah dog, now known in academic circles as the Indian Native Dog or INDog, has survived and flourished.
Documentation by artists like Chittaprosad of the famine of 1943 frequently depict dogs in the same frame as starving humans. This photograph shows a skeletal child, dead or dying, next to a far better fed dog, who is presumably asleep, and certainly in no danger of being eaten. The Indian native dog is so timid and approachable that capturing and killing one should be easy even for weakened human beings. Yet, millions of people in Bengal in 1943, just like millions in different regions of India in the preceding centuries, starved to death rather than cooking the dogs that were all around them.
It isn’t as if eating dog meat is entirely unknown in India: it is well established in some regions of the North East bordering Burma. Dog flesh is regularly eaten in nations like China, Vietnam and South Korea, to the horror of Europeans and Americans. A number of those westerners, not to mention liberal Indians, find a ban on cow flesh laughable, but firmly believe dog eating ought to be outlawed. A ban on beef qualifies as regressive while a ban on dog meat is considered progressive, despite the absence of any ethical reason why people should be allowed to cook cows but not dogs.
Early conditioning
I have never eaten dog myself, at least not consciously, (a couple of cheap Chinese restaurants in my home town of Bombay are rumoured to serve dog meat as mutton, so it’s possible I’ve partaken of canine flesh in disguise), and I’m put off by the idea of it. But I can see that my attitude is merely a consequence of growing up treating cows, pigs and goats as meat but dogs as pets. It’s no different from Patricia and the people of Langa township eating sheeps’ eyes but not brains. If I was to be placed in a situation where conventional sources of nourishment were cut off, you can be sure the dogs in the vicinity would be in trouble. Given how often I am kept awake by their barking, I wouldn’t be very sorry either.
Luckily for the dogs in my neighbourhood, I’m as far from such a situation as imaginable at the moment. While brain isn’t on the menu, South Africa has offered plenty of compensation by way of ostrich, eland, springbok, and some of the best steak I’ve ever tasted.
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Why heads? Obviously because they are cheap, and the people in the neighbourhood poor. Once the heads are purchased, the wool is burned off, then the brains removed from the skulls, and what remains placed on a fire again, before being split down the middle so the whole is held together by an easily severed piece of skin. Customers can order half a head or an entire one.
“But why do you get rid of the brain?” I ask. “It’s my favourite variety of offal.”
“I know many people eat brain,” she replies dismissively, “but we throw it away, maybe feed it to the dogs. We eat the eyes and the cheeks. Of course, the tongue is the best part.”
The quest for protein
There seems no taboo against eating brain, as far as I can tell, just a dislike for the organ shared by the whole community. What a waste of good protein and fat. We Indians know a thing or two about that, having taken the shunning of good protein to extremes. It’s not just cows I’m thinking about when I say that, but also dogs. Consider how many recorded famines India has suffered in the past few centuries. Through it all, the pariah dog, now known in academic circles as the Indian Native Dog or INDog, has survived and flourished.
Documentation by artists like Chittaprosad of the famine of 1943 frequently depict dogs in the same frame as starving humans. This photograph shows a skeletal child, dead or dying, next to a far better fed dog, who is presumably asleep, and certainly in no danger of being eaten. The Indian native dog is so timid and approachable that capturing and killing one should be easy even for weakened human beings. Yet, millions of people in Bengal in 1943, just like millions in different regions of India in the preceding centuries, starved to death rather than cooking the dogs that were all around them.
It isn’t as if eating dog meat is entirely unknown in India: it is well established in some regions of the North East bordering Burma. Dog flesh is regularly eaten in nations like China, Vietnam and South Korea, to the horror of Europeans and Americans. A number of those westerners, not to mention liberal Indians, find a ban on cow flesh laughable, but firmly believe dog eating ought to be outlawed. A ban on beef qualifies as regressive while a ban on dog meat is considered progressive, despite the absence of any ethical reason why people should be allowed to cook cows but not dogs.
Early conditioning
I have never eaten dog myself, at least not consciously, (a couple of cheap Chinese restaurants in my home town of Bombay are rumoured to serve dog meat as mutton, so it’s possible I’ve partaken of canine flesh in disguise), and I’m put off by the idea of it. But I can see that my attitude is merely a consequence of growing up treating cows, pigs and goats as meat but dogs as pets. It’s no different from Patricia and the people of Langa township eating sheeps’ eyes but not brains. If I was to be placed in a situation where conventional sources of nourishment were cut off, you can be sure the dogs in the vicinity would be in trouble. Given how often I am kept awake by their barking, I wouldn’t be very sorry either.
Luckily for the dogs in my neighbourhood, I’m as far from such a situation as imaginable at the moment. While brain isn’t on the menu, South Africa has offered plenty of compensation by way of ostrich, eland, springbok, and some of the best steak I’ve ever tasted.