What’s For Dinner? Someone’s Ass!

Apparently alarmed by the crumbling global economy, incensed by the famine crisis sweeping the country, and prompted by the drastic sudden increase in basic alimentation goods such as meat, flour, sugar, and oil, an established butcher in the region of Tiznit, sixty-five miles south of Agadir, Morocco, slaughtered donkeys and, with an impish smile, sold their meat at a lower price than that of conventional meats to his unsuspecting customers who were mostly residing in remote villages.

The police got wind of his activities when a video of him dexterously and energetically slaughtering, chopping and filleting a donkey while another one fatalistically waited behind him circulated via mobile phones among citizens. Filmed standing behind a butcher’s table upon which he mounded chunks of bloody donkey meat, he boasted he had been engaged in this lucrative activity for quite a while now and that throughout Morocco donkey meat is sold in markets; wielding his butcher’s knife, he threatened that if anybody tried to stop him, he wouldn’t hesitate to slaughter them just like he did the donkeys.

As an alternative source of meat, donkeys have been savored throughout history and by different cultures. Even today, donkey meat is still consumed in a number of countries, not all of them impoverished. The famous Saucisson D’Arles is traditionally made with a mixture of pork and donkey meat. In England, on numerous occasions, the Food Standard Agency surveyed the use of donkey meat in salami, pastrami, and chorizo. In Italy, most cotto salami is made out of donkey meat and innards. Kim Jong Il, the North Korean leader who is known for his extravagant and eccentric tastes, is reportedly fond of roasted donkey meat which he reverently refers to as ”heavenly cow.” The French writer Maguelonne Toussaint-Samat once jokingly stated that because donkeys are often beaten, their meat is more tender than other conventional meats. But throughout the world and especially in the Arab countries, the police diligently crackdown on butchers who sell donkey meat and restaurateurs who serve it.

According to a friend of mine who I found out is an expert in the subject, there are three reasons why Arab and Moslem consumers have an aversion to donkey meat and why it is prohibited by their governments. firstly, religious and folkloric beliefs in Arab and Moslem societies consider the meat of the beast of burden “unclean,” thus, unsuitable for consumption. Secondly, the donkeys surreptitiously slaughtered and served up to consumers are not reared for that purpose; they are often sickly and dying. Thirdly, the composition of the donkey’s blood is much different than that of humans and is, medically speaking, unhealthy for humans. I was very much surprised by the latter.

“How so?”

“Unlike human blood, donkey blood contains Alpha-beta (αβ) T cells containing asparagine and alanine,” he explained matter-of-factly.

Trying to qualify his knowledge, I asked: “How do you know this?”

“simple,” my friend, who happens to be a medical doctor, answered. “Years ago, we used to send a nurse to remote villages in the region of Agadir to draw blood samples from villagers for analysis. One such analysis once revealed that the blood samples collected by the nurse were not only anemic, but contained Alpha-beta (αβ) T cells with abnormal levels of asparagine and alanine. The whole hospital was alarmed. The nurse was called in and queried about the location of the villages from which he collected the blood samples. He later confessed that having  been tired and unwilling to trek up the mountains to the remote villages, he decided to draw blood samples from a couple of donkeys he found on his way thinking that no one would tell the difference anyways.”

I was of course shocked.

“How does the body react, then, if one consistently eats donkey meat?”

“When you see someone acting like an ass, he may not know it, but he’s been eating a whole lotta ass meat.”

I thought that this could plausibly explain why Yakoubi shot a police officer, why Erraji was, albeit briefly, thrown in prison, why so many institutions within the Arab and Moroccan governments are dysfunctional.

A. T. B. Copyright © 2008