Lungy Me This
Lungy Me This
Queens New York has some if not the most diverse assembly of global immigrants. Estimates for July of 2008 reported 2,293,007. Flushing New York which is only one of many towns in the borough of Queens has well over 200,000 people which over 40% are Asian.
Now many of these Asians grew up under the kind of third world conditions FZ spoke of in Joe's Garage.They are here now and their culture fro all it's good and bad are for the taking. As a Chef who has been trained in many global culinary global methods i quite enjoy cooking and eating a variety of Asian food. So one goes out to one of the many Asian markets that has a plethora of specialty ingredients you can only find in such a market. In addition to all these dried, canned and cured ingredients there is the fresh protein areas that have some of the largest fish & pork butcher areas but lets not forget the barrels of frogs and the likes of amphibious extraction.
So I was getting some fish and this Fish Monger
who has one eye takes a big old "snork" of mucus I and then spits out the biggest "lungy" in the immediate are where he works with all this fresh fish. Not a single Asian shopper bats an eye.Par for the coarse. The refrigerated and packaged meat areas has no dating on any item all of which is supposedly governed by dating laws. I have seen elderly women just pick up their dress and pee on teh floor in these markets. This is by no means isolated, other frieds who also shop in these markets have seen the exact same story here on multiple occcasion. It's so good to our USDA and the likes are doing such a fine job.
in 2002 i had the privilege of taking my family to beijing for a week. everyone there smokes, hence everyone there spits. constantly. wherever they happen to be. you really had to watch where you stepped and where you placed your hands. we carried hand sanitizer with us and used it often. the worst thing we saw, however, was on a side trip to a neighborhood farmers market. we watched an old woman haggle with a merchant for a chicken. when the deal was struck, the merchant twisted the live bird's head off, plunged it into a vat of boiling water, and then proceeded to pluck off the feathers. when he was done with that, he slit open the abdomen of the bird and let the guts fall out onto the ground. the woman must have felt that she was being cheated because she started to b***h at the vendor (it must be a universal language thing, we all understood it as b******g) so he scooped the guts up off of the ground and shoved them back into the body cavity. she took her now complete purchase and walked away, apparently satisfied with the deal.
Apparently a real delicacy in the Philipines is duck embryo on the half shell ... Gross!