Veritable Virtual Cornucopia

Here is an assortment of anecdotal rimshots, arranged carefully in a wicker horn o’ plenty, and placed as the centerpiece on the Plebiscite Thanksgiving kids table. What?!? (Here are some tidbits I dug up from some old notes):

Flying into Kunming, China this summer, I was reading John Barlow’s Everything but the Squeal, which documents this dude’s attempt to eat every identifiable part of the pig he can, while criss-crossing his wife’s homeland in the northern Spanish region of Galicia. Personal-narrative travel-writing type stuff (my secret guilty pleasure). While it’s not the most riveting conceit, there are some truly stellar passages.(1) “Dirty Day in Laza,” for instance describes a trip to an annual Dionysian orgy of epic porcine magnitude. Dirty day apparently comprises equal parts good-natured pranksterism, violence, drinking, hedonism, and pork eating (the steaming, sticky head meat known as cachucha, to be exact). Anyway, I’m reading about this, as the greenery of the Yunnan hills is coming into view, wondering if there’s any Chinese equivalent that I’ll stumble upon. Probably not. Then I start thinking about these forgotten little corners of our world that travel writers have a penchant for/prerogative to make sound awesome and appealing. I remembered The Mayor’s Tongue, which I read not long before Squeal and in which the eponymous mayor—an evil Ghost of Christmas Present –type character—resides in the hills of a mystical alternate-universe version of Trieste. Not a travel book, but the same writerly license being employed in bending the exotic toward the phantasmagorical.

I experienced some cognitive dissonance reading about Galician pork adventures, while flying into southwestern China. Not unlike taking a sip of iced tea, when you expect to be drinking Mr. Pibb. 

Here’s the thing about white meat turkey: Why?

 

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(1) One of which, we managed to excerpt for the next issue of meatpaper. Hey, that’s self-promotion! Hey!