I was visiting my French friend Elie, who offered me a jar of pickled snail. “It’s from the backyard,” he said proudly, “made fresh.” Staring at the unknown objects soaked in dark liquid, I involuntarily stepped back. My friend protested, “You eat oysters! What’s wrong with snails?”

My other friend James took a trip in West China a few months ago and came back with horror stories about dishes of snakes and scorpions presented to him. He told tales of how he was asked to pick a snake from a cage, and how the very snake he chose was skinned, chopped, and put in a stew. “It was horrifying, extremely barbarian.” He ended the comment with an expressive shiver.

I wonder what James would say if he had lived in West China in the old times. Life used to be so hard in some areas that people were forced to eat the first creature they came across. During times of harsh weather or nature disasters, hardly anything grew in their land. Some had to kill their pets for meat, while others resorted to hunting scorpions. The brave ones ventured into the woods for beasts or wild wetlands for snakes. Their “barbaric” cuisines speak of nothing but the hardship that some human beings had to endure in order to survive. The tradition of snake-eating and scorpion-eating lasted even after living conditions started to improve, partly as a token of those harsh times and people’s determination to survive. With pride, a snake hunter once told me that he deserves to eat the snake because he defeated it in a battle of equals. “I could easily have ended up in the snake’s plate,” he said, “just as it ended up in mine.”