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I was with Luca Spaghetti the first time I ever tried eating the intestines of a newborn lamb. This is a Roman specialty Food-wise, Rome is actually a pretty rough town, known for its coarse traditional fare like guts and tongues - all the parts of the animal the rich people up north throw away. My lamb intestines tasted OK, as long as I didn't think too much about what they were. They were served in a heavy, buttery, savory gravy that itself was terrific, but the intestines had a kind of…well, intestinal consistency. Kind of like liver, but mushier. I did well with them until I started trying to think how I would describe this dish, and I thought,
It doesn't look like intestines. It actually looks like tapeworms.
Then I pushed it aside and asked for a salad.
"You don't like it?" asked Luca, who loves the stuff.
"I bet Gandhi never ate lamb intestines in his life," I said.
"He could have."
"No, he couldn't have, Luca. Gandhi was a vegetarian."
"But vegetarians can eat this," Luca insisted. "Because intestines aren't even meat, Liz. They're just shit."
-- Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love
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