Archaeologists Find 2,400-Year-Old Soup

Chinese archaeologists have discovered a sealed bronze pot containing what they believe is a batch of 2,400-year-old bone soup. The pot was dug up near the ancient capital of Xian. Liu Daiyun of the Shaanxi Provincial Institute of Archeology says, "It's the first discovery of bone soup in Chinese archaeological history. The discovery will play an important role in studying the eating habits and culture of the Warring States Period (475-221BC)." No word on if the archaeologists also found the accompanying ancient crackers.

Re:Of course no crackers

[DNS-and-BIND]

When the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. An offhand lame attempt at humor added by a Slashdot editor does not mean that OMG AMERICAN IMPERIALISM WHARRGARBL.

Slashdot makes no secret of the fact that it's an American website with accompanying worldview. You don't like it, go elsewhere.

Re:What we really want to know...

[gstoddart]

The worst part came at the end, when the enormous cracked-in-half bones were taken out of the boiling pot and given to each of the diners. Waiters showed up with plastic straws. I stood horrified as each of the diners stuck the straw into the broken end of the bone and slurped out the by-now-almost-liquified marrow.

Marrow is eaten in almost all cultures ... it's full of fat and things that people find tasty.

Examples include Ossubuco [wikipedia.org] (which you can probably find pretty readily), roasted bones [thekitchn.com] with the marrow still in 'em, and probably more (OK, those two examples are probably close to the same thing).

Back when people didn't have the luxury of only buying the pretty bits at the supermarket, people basically ate the whole animal. I know loads of people who will feast out on tendon or pig ears -- it's not for me (I don't eat meat), but it's not really surprising that people eat it. Asia and some food-revivalists seem to be the last bastions of eating all of the obscure bits of an animal. The sheer number of foodies nowadays probably makes some of this stuff even more common.

I figure if you're gonna eat animals, embrace the horror, and try all of the parts. Who knows, you could find something you can't live without.

Re:What we really want to know...

[DNS-and-BIND]

Nope. It was the actual taste. After years of living in China I've had all the adventurousness beaten out of me with a truncheon. I ate all sorts of things that aren't typically considered food, and they were all not delicious. It's just with all these pretentious "foodies" these days, they do precisely the opposite: convince themselves that food is good merely because it is exotic. Camel's hump is actually not good. Sea Cucumber is horrible not really for the actual taste, but rather the godawful texture. Sure, it's fun to watch the drunken shrimp jump around in the bowl, but the actual taste experience? Not memorable. Sucking bone marrow with a straw is the kind of thing you have to grow up with. I enjoy pork rinds myself even though I fully understand what they are. Why? I ate 'em when I was a kid. To each his own.

Re:What we really want to know...

[formfeed]

Back when people didn't have the luxury of only buying the pretty bits at the supermarket, people basically ate the whole animal

They still do.

The difference is, traditionally people ate the good meat and turned the not-so-prime parts of exactly the same animal into dishes that -thanks to some creativity- made the rest of the meat tasty as well (at least for the locals). These dishes evolved into regional specialties.

Today, the prime meat is sold and the rest gets rendered, combined with the leftovers of another thousand animals, and processed to turn it into fatty, protein or gelatinous fillers. This mass than ends up in canned soups, soup base, in sausages, ready made dinners, or as natural flavoring added to anything else. - Or if everything else fails, you can always feed it back to the animals.