Saturday, November 03, 2007 Thuds in the kitchen By Ober Khok
DON'T look too far for thuds that go in the night, and awaken us with palpitations in our hearts.
You may not know it, but events that can be treated as banner headlines in the news take place right under your nose.
However, they unfold so subtly you are unaware that something ghastly is afoot. Of course, I say this all in sinister humor. After all, it’s just two days after Halloween. Surely I deserve my right to talk about horrors in the kitchen.
Every day, some rough punching and kneading take place in oven-hot rooms worldwide and the victims have never been known to put up a fight.
Bakers say bread needs this manhandling, although some types of bread only require the pain that a rolling pin can exact. “It’s a necessary evil,” said a baker in my neighborhood.
Cooks like me can be very merciless when it comes to abusing Humpty Dumpty. Talk of unfair treatment and abuse in the kitchen!
Eggs are not only boiled, peeled and chopped beyond recognition, they are also cracked, then beaten till golden yellow and foamy, and tortured in a hot, nonstick pan till it is cooked. Well-set but still moist is how a perfect scrambled egg should be.
No day passes without heads rolling for the sake of consumers who demand fresh victims for their daily table offerings.
It’s no Chicken Run, which had a happy ending. I don’t know how it’s done in the cold chambers of poultry farms, but at home the ritual of preparing live chicken for the slaughter is so gruesome you almost swear off anything to do with poultry. I’d miss chicken salad, though.
The lesson here, which we learned from watching horror films: Close your eyes or half-close them so you see only darkness or only vaguely, and you’ll be fine.
Thousands of chicken bare their necks in their noble sacrifice to feed mankind. You can’t imagine how many motherless (poultry is presumed to be female) chicks are left behind, but that’s how fowl life goes.
This fate goes for pigs, too. They conclude their owners love them because they are pampered with food and daily baths. In the end, the jaws of death await them.
It’s a destiny that pigs and chickens can’t change, although they are heroic in their last march on earth and do so in a delicious way.
You would think that domestic kitchens spare our finned neighbors.
Year-round, innocent victims of man’s hunger fall prey to the cleaver. After being caught wholesale in nets, then left to struggle for air and eventually die from lack of oxygen, different fishes in the ocean land in wet markets.
The horror has only started.
As soon as the fish arrives in the household kitchen, it is disemboweled and scaled. Later, the missus slices it into servings for escabeche—fish in sweet-sour sauce, slivered ginger and carrots—to cover-up the crime; or plops it whole into a pot for inun-unan (fish stewed in vinegar) to tamper with the body of evidence.
An unbearable horror, of course, comes from food burned beyond recognition and passed off as barbecue.
A classic horror comes from food poisoning due to salmonella, which is in turn caused by unsanitary food handling, and spoiled food.
To this day, though, I still consider world hunger as the scariest, saddest, and cruelest of all horror stories. It is enough to transform me into a grateful boy for any food on my table, even if it is just meat burned beyond recognition and passed off as barbecue. (ober.khok@yahoo.com)
