Chinese Serving River Rats for Dinner

People are entitled to eat whatever they want to gorge their faces with. Some like sushi. Others like halibut. In the South, chitterlings and pickled pigs feet is a great meal. While in the North, duck may be more appealing. In foreign countries, the taste buds are bit more eccentric but what fine dining restaurants are doing in China has to be the most outlandish catch of them all.

Rodents like mice and rats have long been a part of the diet of some countries. Unappealing to the American palette and never a part of the menu in Europe, varmints like the mouse and rat have found themselves on the plate of some of China's most respected restaurants over the years. Now it is certainly unimaginable for Chef Gordon Ramsey or Martha Stewart to plate a mouse surprise with a side of baked onions and sautéed sour kraut. But it is even more unbelievable that restaurants are getting their delicacies from less than ideal locations.

In the Hunan province near Dongting Lake, residents have been asked to supply restaurant chefs with live rats for just under a dollar for over two pounds. Now that does not sound terribly bad does it? The story gets worse. The reason residents are able to supply the restaurants is because of the supply they now have on their hands. And no rats have not experienced a similar population boon like the human population. The fact is, over two billion rats have been displaced because of a flooded lake. Besides the fact that it is impossible to estimate two billion with any degree of certainty the fact that scientists believe that are at least two billion alien rats now making their home in more civilized quarters than their now flooded lake means that they brought the diseases and malfeasance with them that was the norm for their former home.

People in Guangzhou are reputed as a culture that will eat anything that moves but the possibility of rampant disease in the rats would make consuming these rodents a nightmare. Some restaurants have gone so far as to have rat parties where residents were able to sell one kilogram of rat meat for twenty dollars.

Government officials have begun to look into the problem. Not because restaurants are beginning to serve the rats but because of the damage the displaced rats are doing on the crops in the fertile farmland in the Huang province. With so much construction going on, including a new city near Guangzhou based on an urban planning concept called aerotropolis, the two billion rats have destroyed 6,200 square miles of crops. With the developments removing such rat killers as snakes and owls, the Chinese government has to solve the problem before any unknown diseases begin to appear in the Chinese populous.

Guangzhou has received global attention lately as it pushes to transform an area of its province into a regional transit hub. The aerotropolis, an urban planning profile created by an American professor at the University of North Carolina is based on urban areas reinventing themselves around an airport. The airports would become the baseline for that cities economy, driving its industries and future developments. Currently Guangzhou has used Memphis as its model for development.

The one thing Memphis does not have is two billion displaced rodents flooding its city, eating its crops and carrying diseases. With several billion dollars already committed in development, including the construction of the new Three Gorges Dam, Guangzhou officials cannot afford for the investment to be wasted because of two billion rats. But is there really a solution for killing two billion rats?

Without a solution to the problem, rats will continue to be served piping hot, in some of the finest restaurants in China. With the hope that patrons will never become sick because of the diseases carried by river rats.