A chicken’s foot in my soup. A CHICKEN’S FOOT IN MY SOUP! Floating around like a wizened old witch’s claw in amongst the vegetables and lump of congealed blood. I don’t mind the blood, or most of the vegetables, but how can there be any possible benefit, conceivable excuse or imaginable additional taste sensation attached to the culinary abomination that is a severed chicken’s foot? Feet should never be floating in anything, unless they are attached to something that is splashing around in a swimming pool or bobbing about in a Jacuzzi. This is not to in any way deny that Thai food is some of the most delicious on the planet. But, a chicken’s foot…in my soup?
I’ve seen people sucking on a chicken’s foot they found in their soup. Let me make it quite clear – no foot, whatever it belongs to, or indeed formerly belonged to, should ever be sucked.
In the West some people may imagine it a wise course of action to utilise the heart, gizzard, liver and other giblets from a fowl to create stuffing or gravy, but that stuffing and gravy never looks like its constituent parts. A chicken’s foot is bloody unmistakable. Feet are to be walked on, and when they are no longer being walked on, never mentioned again.
I am aware that there are many out there who do not share my opinion. There are, after all, plenty of websites dedicated to people who are overly fond of feet (usually other people’s feet, not chicken’s), but as a well brought up, prudish, repressed and largely unadventurous Brit, I again shout no. Not even if one is celebrating one’s golden anniversary, it is a rainy afternoon, and one has pretty much tried everything related to that fifteen minutes in the bedroom after the lights go out, should one try a bit of foot sucking.
I once saw a video on a world wide website of a young lady ruining a perfectly good pair of 15 denier nylon stockings by putting her foot through them for what I can only assume was the nefarious, voyeuristic pleasure of other gentlemen who were also paying ten dollars per minute. I was shocked, a pair of ‘Jonathan Aston Seduction Set, 15 denier, matte finish, sheer toes’ goes for at least 25 dollars in any reasonable hosiery emporium, as I’m sure we are all aware. And there wasn’t even any oral action going on.
I remember once when I was younger, times were simpler and Adam and the Ants were celebrating the post-punk era with their BRIT Award winning album ‘Kings of the Wild Frontier’, my pet cat stuck her foot in my mouth. I was literally gobsmacked. A short sharp visit to the veterinary surgeon was only narrowly avoided after I considered the fact that cats spend a great deal of time licking their own feet, therefore keeping them relatively clean. Chickens don’t clean their feet, as far as I know. I am also willing to overlook the fact that cats suck their feet because they give us such joy through their oftentimes side-splitting shenanigans on the interweb. Chickens are going to have to raise their game significantly on YouTube if they want the same consideration.
Foot fetishism, or podophilia, is currently the most popular form of fetishism not involving the more obviously unmentionable parts of the human body (I couldn’t find any definitive statistics on whether or not this is the same with chickens). And I am not denying that a few people in this world have been blessed with very shapely tootsies.
What man wouldn’t want to spend a lazy afternoon with burlesque dancing foot-fancier Ditta Von Teese running her toes up and down his shin under the table in a classy restaurant (Thomas Hardy, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Ted Bundy were also self-confessed toe suckers for the female foot fantasists reading this). But If the lovely Ditta were to stand up half way through the first course, perform one of her majestic striptease routines in nothing but a dress made of diamonds and for the denouement stick her foot in my Gazpacho and ask me to suck it off, I’d be sorely disappointed.
And Ditta’s feet are probably a pair of the nicest currently walking around. She would probably have had a shower and put on a very nice pair of Christian Louboutins, Jimmy Choos or Manolo Blahniks before coming to meet me. Oh goodness, we are skating too close to shoe fetishism. I’m not sure if getting ones rocks off to a pair of stilettos or comfortable brogues is worse than sucking a foot or finding chicken’s toes floating in ones soup, but I’m sure the editors at Citylife will agree that retifism is not an appropriate subject for a magazine that somebody may be reading over breakfast.
I really don’t have a problem with anyone’s relationship with feet, however abhorrent and offensive, but we live in Chiang Mai. Most of the people who will permit me to associate with them wear sandals or flip-flops. It’s hot and dirty here and I’m just concerned that after a few too many glasses of cheap lager beer people may let their guard down, pop off to a guest house and indulge in an inadvisable bout of foot partialism without first undertaking a rigorous sanitising regime. I’m pretty sure you can’t get Dengue Fever from inserting another person’s toe into one of the body’s major portals of entry, but one can never be too careful.
This article, dear reader, was supposed to be about a lovely day trip I took last month to see the glorious Wat Prajomklao Rachanusorn high in the mountains above Lampang. But the whole experience was destroyed by that chicken’s foot in my soup. I spent the day sulking and never got to see the colourful hilltop chedis. Although I am still slightly shaken by the whole experience, I think we’ve had the chance this month to discuss a very important subject.
Oh, for goodness sake, there’s a recipe on the web for edible Hobbit feet. I give up.
