Raw Meat as Culinary Tradition

Belgium's delicacy is the world's disgust: food in cultural context

Feb 23, 2006
Katrien Vander Straeten

toast cannibale - Katrien Vander Straeten

In Belgium raw meat is a delicacy. But try to convince an Indian or an American of that! Do irrational taboos still inform the taboo?

My mother-in-law gasped! I was about to fry some minced beef and had just popped a spoonful of the raw meat into my mouth. Yum. But by the look on her face, you would have thought I had just sunk my teeth into a dead rat!

Her revulsion was not for the meat per se. She is an omnivorous Bengali from Calcutta who on rare occasions will eat beef. No, it was its rawness. There are deep-seated taboos about consuming raw meat in every culture in the world. And as with all culinary taboos, there is a fine line between dirtiness and delicacy.

In my home country of Belgium, raw meat can be a treat: we consume slabs of raw, uncured ham, and kids will often beg for the soft little meatballs before they go into the sauce. Indeed, we eat raw meat on an almost daily basis, as a spread on our sandwiches.

A particular favourite is "filet americain" or "tartare de boeuf": raw ground beef with mayonnaise, capers, Worcestershire sauce, pickles, small onions and salt and pepper. A variant, "americain prepare", also has raw egg yolks in it. Why "americain"? An amusing explanation is that Christopher Columbus, on landing in America, remarked that the indigenous people ate raw meat that was heavily spiced. It's possible: many European recipes are several centuries old.

True, in India, refrigeration is not quite adequate: even in Calcutta, frequent power outages will render perfectly decent fridges useless. But the revulsion for raw meat goes deeper than rational considerations of health and hygiene. For even in North America, the most refrigerated region in the world, there is an almost inborn squeamishness regarding raw, red burger meat.

Is it, as some scholars of food suggest, that raw meat is more "dead" and closer to "rotten" than cooked or roasted meat, which is dead meat that has been "cultured" back into civilization? Even worse, does its rawness remind us of our own, uncooked flesh? If that taboo is still informing our culinary habits, the Belgians are on top of it: tongue-in-cheek, we call a sandwich topped with filet americain "toast cannibale".

Needless to say, that last tidbit was not of much help in my attempt to persuade my mother-in-law of the tastiness of this particular very fresh, well-kept raw meat.