Guangzhou Culinary Delicacy And Viagra Substitute: Here Kitty!

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Guangzhou Culinary Delicacy And Viagra Substitute: Here Kitty!

Shu-Ching Jean Chen

Forbes

07.25.07

 

Not all Chinese meat eaters are bothered by the high price of pork, the culprit

behind China’s runaway inflation. Consumers in the southern Chinese city of

Guangzhou savor an alternative delicacy: cat meat.

 

An investigative report on Tuesday by the city's famous muckraking newspaper Xin

Kuai Bao added cat to the long list of rare meats Guangzhou diners have devoured

to their heart's content, including the cat's favorite prey, rat. While rat has

recently been sold as " heavenly dragon meat " in Guangzhou, cats are being

packaged into a dish called " a scramble of dragon and tiger. "

 

In accordance with its long-standing investigative tradition, Xin Kuai Bao sent

reporters to pose as customers and took a batch of photos featuring the full

brutality of the cat-cooking process. Pictures posted online show a skinny white

cat being boiled alive while a worker beat it with a wooden stick, said to help

mix the blood with the meat and thus enhance the flavor of the dish. Its skin

was later stripped off completely by a modern, high-speed plucking machine.

 

Beyond purely culinary considerations, the flesh and blood of cats are

considered to have a particular benefit in restoring male sexual potency. In

spite of the wide piracy of Viagra in China, men continue to turn to such

extraordinary sources for help.

 

The newspaper traced the cat consumption trade back to the countryside or the

streets of towns in several central Chinese provinces: Henan, Hebei, Jiangxi,

Anhui and Zhejiang. Commercial cat owners sell their animals to wholesalers, and

stray cats are rounded up and sold by cat catchers, many of them farmers, at

less than 3 yuan (17 cents) per creature, a meager price but nonetheless an

important income supplement for poor rural dwellers.

 

At Guangzhou’s largest live animal wholesale market, in the suburbs, tens of

thousands of cats change hands at a price of 7 yuan (92 cents) each. These are

then marked up to sell to several Guangzhou restaurants at about 20 yuan ($2.64)

per Chinese jin (500 grams). A full serving of " a scramble of dragon and tiger "

can fetch a price of between 150 yuan ($19.80) and 380 yuan ($50) in top

restaurants, the report said.

 

Guangdong province, of which Guangzhou is the capital, was the origin of the

SARS epidemic that erupted in 2003. The disease was thought to have spread

through the eating of civets, a catlike carnivore that is a carrier of the SARS

virus, though some scientists have now fingered bats as the original reservoir

of the disease.

 

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