KZBlog

Chris Merriman prompted to me to write a quick note on Dom Joly’s take on horsemeat.

A while ago, I was at a formal celebration and they served beshbarmak made of horse meat, but not just horse meat: the big fatty chunks of horse meat. In fact there was very little actual meat on the plate. Of course as the guest from far away, I got a large chunk of pure fat while funnily enough the children were given scraps of pure meat. How I wished I was not an honored guest. I got a knife and started to cut the meat off the bone and I was cutting away as much fat as I possibly could. An older man who was sitting next to me and had sort of taken me under his wing, was sitting watching me and was trying so hard to contain himself, but he just couldn’t help muttering under his breath: “He’s cutting the fat? He shouldn’t cut off the fat. He doesn’t want it? He doesn’t want the fat? Maybe Americans don’t eat fat. He really should eat it.” I felt so bad, but I couldn’t bring myself to down the huge chunk of fat particularly as I had just been to the doctor recently and he had said I should watch my diet a bit.

So the moral of the story is when Kazakhs come to eat with Americans or Brits, they are probably saying to themselves, “Where’s the fat? This meat tastes like crap without fat.”