Animal Cruelty and Cultural Dining

[JBeukema]

The video above is fairly graphic. Do not watch if you are faint of stomach or heart. By now, most people have seen the video circulating the Internet which features a fish that has been deep-fried, being consumed...alive. Yes, the fish is still alive during the deep-frying process and while it's being happily eaten by a raucous table of Chinese diners. They poke and prod the fish's face and mouth to force it to gasp desperately while laughing as it flails fruitlessly on the plate. To say the video is disturbing is putting it mildly.
By American dining standards, this practice transcends the boundaries of tastelessness into simple cruelty. But by Chinese dining standards, this is simply showmanship and presentation -- the equivalent of Bananas Foster flambeed tableside. The comments on every video you find on the web seem to have the same argument behind them: What we view as cruel is simply another culture's cuisine -- and we, as Westerners, are the originators and advocates of far more inhuman practices in the name of good food.
Could it be that we find the fish video more disturbing because very few videos exist of force-feeding geese for foie gras or confining calves for veal? Or could it be because we don't look at the roach-like crustaceans such as lobsters the same way we look into a fish's sad, milky eye, the way we assign it some sort of humanity as it flaps helplessly on the plate?
Below are five similarly inhumane practices that people across the world employ for the sake of fine dining. Are these better or worse than Chinese deep-fried fish? You decide.

Deep-Fried and Still Alive: 5 Culinary Practices As Cruel As the Chinese Deep-Fried Fish - Houston Restaurants and Dining - Eating Our Words

 

[FRIKSHUN]

I don't like it AT ALL!!