The Joy of Spare Parts and the Extended Story on Innovation

 A few days ago, I ran into a German fellow whom I had recently befriended. He described one of his worst meals in Africa as “Chicken Feet.” He couldn’t understand why anyone would want to eat chicken feet and the Bistrot owner, who is born and bred in France felt inclined to agree. Both his girlfriend, who is Nigerian, and I, defended the culinary delight of chicken feet.

We all need to eat but food is not just a necessity. It’s an emotional experience that ties us to our roots. At the same time, it’s the one part of any particular culture that gets easily adapted by another. It is also one of the places where we see some of the greatest forms of innovation.

The innovation you see in recipes comes from necessity and if I look at the discussion over chicken feet, there’s a clear cultural difference. The German and Frenchman come from places where meat has always been plentiful. If you look at Western cuisine, you’ll find plenty of meat dishes and its usually for the bits of the animal that is most meaty. Hence, if you walk into a Western restaurant, you will find that the specialties are things like chicken breast and rump steak. Fish dishes are inevitable for the meaty parts of a fish.

However, Asian and Africans, who are from places where meat is not plentiful had to find ways of making each bit of an animal count. Hence, we developed a liking for the parts of any given animal that would make your average Westerner balk. We learnt to make things like feet, wings and heads tasty. Shopping for meat in any given Western country is a heavenly experience because the bits that we treasure are bits that the Westerners can’t get rid off fast enough. In my first week at Goldsmith’s, I ran into a girl from Hong Kong who was thrilled at the prices of fish heads in the UK.

 

Pig Ear Salad – one of life’s hidden gems

 

 Beef Spare-Parts Noodles – a Luxury Item in East Asia. Not to in the Western World

Necessity has made it such that those of us who came from places where meat was not plentiful had to make the most of the animal. Waste is an unforgivable sin.

So, given that East Asians, Africans and people from other “developing” parts of the world have shown a talent for innovation in cuisine using the parts that people who come from the world with plenty tend to discard, shouldn’t we be applying our genius for not wasting to other things.

I mean is world is filled with rubbish, which goes into landfills or gets exported to third world countries in Africa and Asia for people to extract value from rubbish in a way that is dangerous (both physically and environmentally) as well as dirty. Here is an example of what happens:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sTio_0rwR1s

Surely, there has to be a way of making the recycling industry better in every sense of the word. This is particularly so in East Asia, where universities across the region churn out engineering graduates in addition to engineering graduates of East Asian origin who come out of Western universities.

We have plenty of intelligent people and they need to be inspired to put their brains behind reusing things in a way that is safe to people and the environment as well as lucrative. One good example in Green Rubber, a Malaysian Company that has found a way to recycle used rubber or specifically tires, something which the UN had called the “Number One environmental hazard.”

We need more companies like that. Think about it. If we have the genius of developing culinary wonders from the neglected parts of an animal, we surely must have the genius to developing wonderful products from the things other people throw away.