“Fry one or two onions in coconut butter and add 250 milliliters of water. Next, cinnamon, pepper and pine nuts are added, and it is brought to a boil, later adding 100 grams of rice and 40 mm of human blood. The preparation is stuffed into artificial skin, cooking for 20 minutes.”
This recipe by Raúl Escuín, who comes from a family of butchers and lives in Alloza (Teruel), gave rise to a project titled Tú y tu morcilla five years ago. The person concerned had his own blood extracted to use it as the main ingredient of a blood sausage that was called “vegan”. His idea was picked up in national and international media.
“The human being is an animal, but since there is consent, there is no animal abuse or mistreatment, so the product would be vegan,” argued the author of this extravagant proposal.
Is your statement correct? Veganism, as defined by the Vegan Society of the United Kingdom, is a way of life that seeks to exclude, as far as possible and practicable, all forms of exploitation of and cruelty to animals for food, clothing or otherwise. purpose. Therefore, from that point of view, yes: it would be correct to consider it as a vegan food.
Under this premise it would then be possible to prepare blood sausages with the blood of a live pig that did not suffer. This is how the artist John O’Shea proceeded within a project titled Black Market Pudding, avoiding the act of sacrifice. Although, according to the author, his approach “places the consumer in the position of acting more like a parasite than like a traditional carnivore. “This opens up the need for debates about animal rights and the ethics of the meat industry.”
Alloza’s vegan blood sausage had precedents. In 2003, an art group called ENEMA prepared sausages in the traditional Cuban way, but with blood donated by several members of the collective. They presented it at the VIII Havana Biennial, within the Art and Life exhibition.
And there is another documented case, which occurred in 2007 at the Fürstenfeldbruck air base, near Munich. Two soldiers made Bratwurst sausages with his blood, adding onion, bacon, spices and breadcrumbs. When another of the soldiers informed the superior officer that they were requesting blood from their colleagues and their families to continue producing this specialty, they were suspended from their positions.
However, the precursor of this gastronomic “current” was Michel Journiac. In 1969, during his performance of Messe pour un corps (Mass for a Body) at the Templon Gallery in Paris, this French artist presented the audience with a sausage cooked with his own blood.
One of the most notable images of this performance was published in the magazine arTitudes in 1974. In the photograph you can see the artist lying down with a tourniquet on his forearm, while an anonymous person extracts the basic ingredient of the sausage with a syringe.
More recently, in 2018, Dutch journalist Gwen van der Zwan also used her own blood as a culinary ingredient, but was plagued by legal doubts. She consulted criminal lawyer Tom Gijsberts and he told her that a comparable case had never occurred in the Netherlands. “Although I cannot find any legal provision that prohibits using your own blood in a sausage, I expressly advise against it due to the lack of clarity in the regulations on this point and the possible consequences, criminal or not,” clarified the expert.
The journalist, however, continued with her purpose and ran into an additional problem: finding someone to draw her blood. To do this, she turned to the Inner Circle dating app, looking for a doctor willing to draw some blood at her first meeting. At the insistence of her lawyer, who warned her that she could be committing a crime, she watched several videos to learn how to do it on her own.
After the extraction, a Surinamese friend helped her prepare a Suriname blood sausage with lentil dough, tomato puree, soy sauce and spices. Since she had a lot left over, they both had the idea of ??giving the remains to the birds of the Westerpark, in Amsterdam. Again, the lawyer warned them that their behavior could constitute animal abuse, in accordance with article 2.1 of the Animal Law of their country.
The lawyer consulted by Gwen van der Zwan also ventured to the opinion that the consumption of human blood sausage was probably not harmful to health, as long as it did not contain viruses. However, this is highly questionable, because they can harbor prions (agents of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease), mycotoxins or microplastics, among other harmful substances.
If we add to this that we are facing a case on the limit of food legality, it may not be a good idea to prepare or taste one of those “vegan blood sausages”. I, of course, have no interest in trying them.
This article was originally published on The Conversation. José Miguel Soriano del Castillo is a professor of Nutrition and Bromatology at the Department of Preventive Medicine and Public Health at the University of Valencia.
