They say real men don't eat quiche. I would go further and say the really masculine real men also gnaw on gristle and bones.
There's nothing more primal than eating a roast chicken with your hands, tearing off the legs and wings and using your teeth to get all the meat from the bones.
It's almost as satisfying as digging into a plate of barbecued ribs with the sauce staining your fingernails, or attacking every crevice of a lobster, so you can suck out the tasty green tomalley.
Eating has always been one of life's great tactile and sensual pleasures. Think of all those portraits of English king Henry VIII, where he's holding his giant turkey leg.
But somewhere in the course of Western society's prudish progress, it was decided that genteel people shouldn't touch their food. Proper, civilized behavior meant that using utensils was the correct way to eat.
So, we dress up and gentrify our sustenance as etiquette demands. Fine cuisine isn't devoured but nibbled on.
Fish is filleted, meat is trimmed and deboned, even the skin on potatoes and fruit has to be removed for sanitized consumption.
The only exception is casual food like chicken wings. But seeing how much wing meat people sometimes leave on the bones, it seems they just don't want to get their fingers dirty.
At the risk of making broad racial generalizations, that's the difference between Asian and Caucasian dining.
Western palates don't have the love for textures that Asian eaters enjoy. This is why we eat chicken feet, tendon and jellyfish. We like gooey, chewy and other unusual textures, from fish maw to soft pork bones.
We delight in the challenge and work of picking flesh from the carcass. We see a fish head and think: "Yum, can't wait to braise that thing in curry and suck it clean."
To us, true gastronomic appreciation is chewing the fat, licking the skin, jawing on tendon and cartilage, then spitting the bones out on the table.
When I lived in Canada, the local KFC loved my uncle because whenever he ordered a bucket, he always demanded "no breast meat." The manager happily obliged because everybody else wanted the breast.
My uncle hated the dry and bland white meat, which had little of that secret herbs and spices coating. The bony dark meat had the delicious crispy batter stuck all around.
Admittedly, not all Asian diners fit this mold. Mughal chefs in India created a royal kebab called galouti, where the meat is minced so finely that chewing was unnecessary. It was considered luxury for the nobility of the time.
In many cultures, it is the poor who are the true pioneers of nose-to-tail dining. It certainly wasn't a rich guy who first cooked cod sperm or marinated duck tongue, or who turned a pig's snout into a terrine. Eating the more unusual cuts of meat came about through poverty.
When you see a fried shrimp head on a Japanese plate, it's not meant to be decoration. You're supposed to eat it. Really good chefs will skilfully fry prawn shells so you can crunch the whole exoskeleton. That's why they season the outside of a shrimp.
The one line I draw when it comes to gnarly dining is crab. The meat might be sweeter than lobster and langoustines but rarely do I order crab in a restaurant.
To honor the decapod, you should extract every last bit of its flesh. However, I find a delicacy like hairy crab just too tedious and messy, requiring too much work for too little return.
At home, I might consume hairy crab at a leisurely pace, but it's far too time-consuming at a restaurant in front of friends.
What can I say, real men can sometimes be real lazy.
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