You may find it difficult to see the difference between my picture...
...and this one.
The two photos might as well have been taken of the same bowl of soup. That soup is bird's nest soup. The nests come from a particular species of swift. Unlike a normal nest, these are not made of twigs and leaves but rather of the swifts cement-like saliva. The saliva is pasted onto the inner walls of caves by male swifts in China and Indonesia, and is then harvested for the many mythical health benefits it provides. Though considered to be a delicacy and normally quite expensive, there is a garden variety for the every man, and thus it was the 2 dollar soup of the day.
A lesser man would wish he didn't know that he had eaten "nutritional", congealed bird spit soup, but a truly admirable one relishes in the discovery of the truth and the adventure of trying new things. He is not disheartened by the culturally myopic notion that something scraped of the inside of a cave wall should never be boiled, soaked, and eaten, but knows full well that knowledge is empowering and that there is no "right" food. In this situation, I believe I am the former of the two.
my relatives on my mom's side of the family tried to make me eat it. i think i had the same problem at the time i heard it was bird spit. but for the sake of health, I am now taking it regularly.
ReplyDeletebtw, i don't buy the super-expensive kind like old people do. the ready-to-drink kind at the stores are pretty affordable. (e.g. www.geocities.jp/hongkong_bird_nest/index_e.htm)