No thanks, I just starved

I remember once my boss and I were discussing Chinese dishes and he said that there is a saying about the Chinese: "They will eat anything with four legs but a table, and anything that can fly but an airplane"

While I think Westerners should win the prize for being the most willing to eat anything (Cheez Whiz, people, Cheeze Whiz), it's certainly astonishing to see what the Chinese will eat. I've had the opportunity to watch many documentaries about Asian cooking, and most of them have talked about the history and art of Chinese cuisine. One of these shows extensively covered China's 4 Heavenly Foods. They are, in no particular order, shark's fin, sea cucumber, abalone, and birds' nest.

Shark fins are taken off of live sharks and turned into soup, sea cucumbers are collected from the sea and go through a lengthy process just to make them edible, abalone are pried from underwater rocks, and birds' nest are goddamn birds' nest. How can any of these things be seen as delicious? It seems only the Chinese could see a shark fin rise out of the water and think 'dinner'. Have any of you seen a freakin' sea cucumber up close? Those things are hideous; they are the wang of the sea. And the birds' nests are found in seaside caves made by cave swifts. They make the nests in the high cave walls during their breeding season out of "interwoven strands of salivary laminae cement". AKA ... bird spit. Delish.

Even though these are an important part of Chinese culinary culture, and considered delicacies, I would like to request that everyone stop eating them. It's totally pointless. No, seriously, put down the spoon. You've been tricked, that's not food.

The show made a few points about these 'foods' very clear. First off, there are difficulties, dangers, and controversy in collecting them. Many people are outraged by the brutality of harvesting shark fins, abalone must be acquired usually by single divers in dangerous conditions, and for cripes sake, there are people climbing cave walls to get hunks of bird spit for their soup!

But more importantly these heavenly foods are all quite tasteless on their own, requiring the skilled hands of a master chef to make them a delicacy. Like tofu, these foods are bland and empty on their own, but instead soak up the flavours and seasonings of whatever they are cooked with. So, here's a thought, why not use tofu? No one has ever watched a tofu slowly suffocate in the sea because they just cut off its fin. And I bet no one has ever broke their neck while scaling a slippery cliff to get tofu. Also, as a bonus, tofu is the shape of a block; it doesn't even bother to look like an infected sea dick.

So, what I'm trying to say is, these things aren't heavenly foods, they barely even fit the description of food. It's like hundreds of years ago someone dared the Chinese to make soup out of anything. Then, once they realised they could sell it for an outrageous price, things kind of stuck. If it takes an expert culinary master all of his skill to transform one of these things into an expensive edible dish, I bet they could do it with anything. In the right hands a newspaper could become a mouthwatering main course. At the very least the name should be changed to "The Four Inedible Things China Conquered"