Goat Eating 101

Taken from a wee blog I had going in 2015

Under the shadow of clouds and the blackness of a moon-less sky, my stomach grumbled, craving for local food. Up till now, my perception of local food was a simple kebab and maybe wheat rolls that deceived the beholder by looking and smelling like sausages. And that is what my stomach and mind jointly desired. Naturally, I asked my coworker, Zakir, who was with me on a hunt for food that would satisfy our appetites, where I could get good street food. Like all the important questions in life like where is the best place to get mugged and where would you expect to get drugs from, the answer lied in a dark, dingy and, for the sake of not finding another adjective to complete this triple of alliterations, shady alley.

Surrounded by darkness, one could make out a single man sitting next to a pot and a pile of metal bowls. He could have been a soup-making crack dealer but I continued toward him, unafraid in my quest to sample local cuisine. After a few words were exchanged, the man reached into the bowl with a ladle and dumped something into some metal bowls and handed one to me. Alrighty then!

During this time, Zakir was sort of chanting in my ear that it was very healthy which made me slightly confused by his sudden interest in my well-being. So then I took a flashlight and shone it on my bowl to see what this borderline-drug-dealer had dealt me. In the bowl was a bit of soup with oil coagulation on the top and a long piece of meat in it. This meat had a bone sticking out of one end and a joint in the middle but what concerned me was what I saw on the other end. It was two pronged and brownish-black in colour. My first thought was goat feet but then I dismissed the thought for being too absurd; at which point, Zakir took a break from his health chants and promptly told me that it was goat foot.

Incredibly shocked, I lifted the trotter upwards to examine it more closely and it just hung limp in the air. That just did it for me and I was really contemplating not eating it, turning Buddhist and living in a field of rice and vegetables. The act of eating meat in itself is fairly alright given that the piece of meat being eaten has little to no resemblance to the actual animal from which it came. But this… This LOOKED like the trotter of a dead goat. What sort of makes the experience even worse is that everywhere you go in Kargil, a goat will undoubtedly enter your field of vision. So looking at it really felt like looking at a really gruesome version of a Before and After Picture. It was as disgusting as looking at a corpse’s hand because, its limpness just reminded you that it was once alive. And now dead. And now you were going to chew something was once alive. And now dead.

But I was a man and men don’t back away from inhumane things like dead goat feet. So I bent my head and took a bite. I’m not sure of whether it was actually terrible or if the very experience of eating something synonymous to death ruined my palette but I did not like it one bit. It was slimy and salty – like oysters, that is if you feel like Satan every time you eat an oyster. Honestly speaking, if I heard a goat bleat mid-chew, I would have puked up and run away to hide in a cave in order to come to terms with my lack of humanity (or goatity).

Eating it in itself was a talented activity. The custom was that once you were done with the shin area of the goat and were about to move on to the foot area of the dead animal, you break off the shin at the joint and throw it onto the floor. The foot area has multiple bones which takes a skilled person to navigate through. However, the Ladakhis are fairly lazy so they just pop the entire thing in their mouth, let the tongue do the navigating and once the meat was eaten, they spit the small bones straight onto the floor. So I followed suit, majestically if I may add. And I did all this while simultaneously crying inside, while my mind went through a montage of cute goat pictures from 9gag and of bags of goat heads one can find outside meat shops in Kargil.

But I eventually finished it, with self-conflict and doubt racking my mind, and looked up to find my two coworkers looking up at my face expectantly. So just like the Penguins of Madagascar in an awkward situation, I smiled and waved (sans the awkward wave). I was all smiles afterwards but deep inside, I knew that I was in desperate need for therapy.

Later I was told that it was prepared using goat trotter (naturally), water and salt. So the ‘soup’ that I drank was, in fact, a mixture of water, salt and goat feet fat. Tasty. Later I also learnt of the actual reason why they eat this ‘delicacy’. Much to my surprise it did not originate after a farmer with a foot fetish got incredibly pissed off at his incessantly bleating goat! It was because in the winter, food is scarce and Ladakhis can’t really afford to waste anything, including goat feet (even though I still suspect a foot fetish having a role in this). Hence the feet are eaten. So in addition to being an incredible experience, it is a sort of symbol representing the incredibly difficult lives Ladakhis have to lead, especially in their winters. However, this intellectual take-away from this horrifying experience was something that I came to upon further reflection a few days later. After all, how do you expect clarity of the mind when the mind is in some incredibly BAAAAAAd turmoil! (the pun had to be made)