Spare Rib Soup

The most delicious part of a pig is probably its spare ribs. It is free of fat. It is tender and it is sweet. I like mine cooked with salted bean paste, chili padi, laced with a little lime juice - steamed until it is soft & tender and sprinkled with spring onions and parsley. Wow, this is delicious.

To me, it will be a waste as a soup base. But now, it is a craze in south-east China to order ‘Spare Rib Soup’. This is a special soup where customers can’t order off the menu. It takes 8 hours to double-boil the soup to draw out its effectiveness. This ‘spare rib’ together with chicken meat and a concoction of expensive herbs are specially prepared to boost the vigor of a man’s sexual strength and stamina. Sounds interesting. Mmm Good N 7up.

This palatable dish which originates from China is better than synthetic Viagra for it is natural. But the catch is, not anyone with a faint heart dared to enjoy it. For these ‘spare ribs’ are actually unborn babies or premeditated aborted babies.

Eating fetuses is nothing strange to the Chinese. According to old-wives’ tales, fetuses have nutritional properties which include cure for asthma, kidney defects, a beautiful skin and most important to improve sex drive.

One would asked, where from do they obtain a steady flow of supply to cater to the demand. There is no other obvious place but from state hospitals. They have abundant supplies. Some hospitals even give them away free. Hospitals staff frequently take home fetuses and placentas to make broth to maintain poor health. As fetuses and placentas are now widely known, enterprising individuals have started to sell them to restaurants, research centers for the development of vaccines for polio, hepatitis A, chicken pox and rubella and cosmetic companies in the manufacturing of creams or Botox-like injections.

How much is a fetus worth? The price of a dead fetus (which died a natural death) costs RMB2,000. Aborted fetus goes for only a few hundreds. If couples do not wish to sell their dead babies, the placentas can fetch for a couple of hundreds.

This is the result of China’s family planning policy of ‘one child to one family’. Right from our ancestors, a son is preferable to a daughter. A son carries on the family name and the family legacy. A daughter is a ‘loss’ and is looked upon as an outsider after marriage.

With their dislike for female children, abortions are the only way out to acquire a male in the family. In China, abortion is an ongoing affair, nothing new, nothing to frown upon, and nothing to be afraid about. Li Wei once shared that in the urban areas where the population are saturated; the one child policy is effective. In the rural prefectures, they are allowed to have two or three children depending on the population density. And government officials can be very ‘strict’ about this policy.

Idi Amin, the Ugandan military dictator fed on testicles of young boys, like wise the Chinese have a meal of placentas and fetuses. And I can’t bring myself to swallow any of them. Cannibalism is very disheartening.