The Weekly Screed (#620)

“They’re like locusts”
By David Benjamin

MADISON, Wis. — Picture a sunny Jurassic day in China. A T-rex is minding his own business, feasting on the carcass of a protoceratops. Suddenly, along comes a small band of Chinese hunters, heavily armed. They pause, gaze hungrily at the scene and proceed to lasso the tyrannosaur and tie it down.

Then, while the great beast is still alive, the Chinese hunters hack off its left foot at the knee. They carry off their prize, joyously proclaiming in prehistoric Mandarin: “Hoo boy! This is gonna make a great tyrannosaur left-foot soufflé!”

The Chinese hunters go on to cripple six more T-rexes before the day is over. The dinosaurs, bound and one-legged, end up eaten alive by raptors and allosaurs

Luckily, there were no Chinese hunters in those days. If there had been, the rarest, most magnificent animals of that era would have been prematurely wiped out. The asteroid that ended the Age of Dinosaurs would have been an anticlimax.

For some reason, the Chinese love to kill many of nature’s scarcest species, in order to remove one little body part — after which they leave the rest of the beautiful beast rotting in the sun. The Chinese kill tigers for their penises. They murder rhinos for their horns. They butcher bears to get their gall bladders. To make pornographic figurines, they rip the tusks from dying elephants. They hack off the fins of sharks and throw them back into the water, alive but helpless.

Lately, the Chinese have triggered a war among fishermen in the Yucatan, over the harvesting of sea cucumbers — oversized worm that crawls the ocean-bottom sucking up the waste excreted by other denizens of the deep. Almost all of your typical civilized people avoid eating sea cucumbers, largely because of the thing’s diet and because 99 percent of your typical sea cucumber is inedible.

The Chinese are different. They eat a lot of stuff the rest of humanity regards as — to use the technical term — “yucky.” Even then, all the Chinese usually want is a teensy piece of the victim beast — like tiger-pecker, or that tyrannosaur’s left foot. This rule applies to sea cucumbers, who are killed by the millions for the sake of a half-dozen strips of muscle weighing perhaps an ounce.

Scientists argue about whether greenhouse gases, or water pollution, ocean acidification, or some other great unseen force — even the arrival of another killer asteroid — is the greatest threat to the earth’s environment. My candidate for the title is none of the above. It’s China.

No nation on earth has a comparable knack for consuming the ickiest part of some rare and precious resource, after which they chuck the rest of it. Until lately Americans had cornered the market on squandering and plundering God’s creation. But as China gets bigger and richer and starts using its frequent flier miles to jet off to threatened habitats in search of jaguar testicles and polar bear sinuses, the Chinese spoliators are leaving Uncle Sam in the dust.

China’s relationship to nature calls to mind the words of President Whitmore (Bill Pullman) in the film, Independence Day. After reading an alien invader’s mind, he says, “They're like locusts. They're moving from planet to planet… After they've consumed every natural resource they move on… and we're next.”

The quandary is why the Chinese insist on obliterating our rarest creatures. Why don’t they make their delicacies and aphrodisiacs out of beasties that we have too many of? Maybe we can halt China’s assault on our endangered species by sending them a cookbook, featuring recipes for our least-loved critters…

Mosquito jam. Cockroach pot-pie. Bedbug-zucchini chutney. Mildew consommé. Kudzu beer. Dandelion wine. Tapeworm pasta. Crabgrass salad with rabbit-pellet croutons. Maggot risotto. Urban pigeon a l’orange.

Trouble is, the Chinese are crafty enough to see through this ploy. Although they might be tempted to spice up their traditional menu with foreign pests and Western garbage (just as they’ve developed a taste for their own landfill ingredients), they’d probably turn up their noses — just to spite us.

As I thought about this, though, another movie scene appeared to me. In the dystopian classic, Demolition Man, Sandra Bullock leads Sylvester Stallone into a subterranean jungle where all of society’s outcasts live. Stallone spots a little food stall purveying dishes forbidden in the micromanaged aboveground world. He thrills at the smell of a burger on a grill and begins eating before he realizes that this is an underworld with no access to beef. He asks what’s inside his bun.

“Rat,” says Stallone after getting the answer. “This is a ratburger?… Not bad.”

Imagine the improvement in all mankind’s quality of life, and health, if we could get the Chinese to embrace the ratburger as their favorite culinary import.

Wait. Don’t scoff. When you consider that the wealthiest Chinese eagerly pay a fortune to eat soup whose main ingredient is bird-spit, this is not inconceivable.

Imagine the blessings of a ratburger vogue in China. Think of the rhinos, elephants and amur leopards spared a slow, ghastly death. Think of the vermin-borne diseases snuffed out. Think of the unemployed masses restored to prosperity and respectability as professional rat-wranglers. Think of the fast-food possibilities.

Of course, as we know, the Chinese are smart and sneaky. We can’t just hand them a platter full of ratwhoppers, vermin fries and gophermeat sliders, and expect them to dig right in. They might smell a you-know-what. We have to trick them.

So, first thing we do, we pass laws specifically forbidding the international trade in USDA-inspected grade-A rat meat. The president denounces the black market in prestigious New York-subway “steak.” Next, at the United Nations, the Secretary of State demands sanctions against any rogue nation that trades illegally in a long list America’s most precious culinary resources.

Sirloin of wharf rat, Kosher dill mousepickles, candied cockroach feelers…