“They eat their dogs, they eat their cats.” The method is usual in the Trump universe: a hoax used to attack a disadvantaged group and which provokes surprise and indignation, but which, apparently, works and ends up imposing itself among his audience and the potential voters of the Republican candidate. He published it during the recent electoral debate with Kamala Harris, referring to Haitian migrants, whom he accused of feeding on the pets of the inhabitants of Springfield (Ohio).
Beyond the face of Vice President Harris, the deluge of memes and the fact that it is worrying that someone could believe such nonsense, the truth is that, among so many other approaches, the issue also has its gastronomic side. Because in Ohio, obviously, they don’t eat cats today. But maybe at some point in history, in times of scarcity, it was done. This happened, for example, in Spain during the famine and post-war years.
Something well known and documented. So much so that there are still old recipe books where a dish has been slipped in which cats appear as an alternative ingredient and even the popular proverb keeps intact that of giving a cat for a hare. In fact, it was not uncommon that just two generations ago, someone looked with some suspicion if a rabbit was sold without a head on the market.
Stewed or sauced cat
“I was sitting at the table next to my grandmother, but I didn’t get to try it. It was a big, beautiful, cinnamon-colored cat. They also ate wild cats, but the meat was much rougher and tougher, and it cost a lot more to cook. This is one of the testimonies collected in the book Hunger recipes. Food in the post-war years (Review, 2023) and it is impossible not to remember now that Trump made headlines over the issue of cooking with pets.
“In the case of the post-war period, we cannot say that it is a cultural norm, but rather the expression of the breaking of a taboo, of a border. The idea is that hunger and need push the limits of what is edible,” explains Lorenzo Mariano, a doctor in anthropology and one of the authors of this book.
Stories of hunger and sadness that are rarely taken into account when writing the gastronomic history of a country. Despite this, these survival dishes have found their place in some books that, from time to time, reappear on social networks and become the topic of conversation for a few hours. This happened a few years ago with Recipes from Basque grandmothers (Ttartalo, 1990), written by José Castillo, in which an 80-year-old woman from Campezo, Alava, shared her recipe for stewed cat. The story is repeated in another book, this time with recipes from Cantabrian grandmothers and where it appears, in more detail and even the weight of the animal, how to prepare a stewed cat.
Survival, by expanding the limits of what can be eaten, Mariano points out, “makes us lose something of ourselves, of our identity and, in the most serious cases, when we move away from the norm, the notion of a person to be moved” towards animality, barbarity.
In the case of the post-war period, we cannot say that it is the cultural norm, but rather the expression of the breaking of a taboo, of a boundary. The idea is that hunger and need push the limits of what is edible.
Lorenzo Mariano
— anthropologist and co-author of “The Recipes of Hunger” (Crítica, 2023)
What Others Eat
The cat is not part of our gastronomic culture, although there are references and recipes from the 15th century. It is a taboo, but it is true that perhaps having heard the stories of our grandparents about the need to eat cats makes it more bearable than other stories that we find in them. Hunger recipes on a plate of dog meat.
Ultimately, food is a key part of culture and identity and what is acceptable or unacceptable to cook is defined by these criteria. What constitutes a pet or possible food varies from society to society and from country to country, as anyone who has witnessed the look of surprise or horror when explaining to an Englishman that in Spain rabbit is a commonly eaten meat will know. To them, it is a pet, of course.
“The way we eat, what we eat, tends to define forms of identity, they are performative social facts that construct the identity of the group,” explains Lorenzo Mariano. An identity that is also constructed in opposition to others and to what they eat. And this is where the danger of his message flourishes, beyond the jokes about Trump’s penultimate madness.
“Trump echoes a kind of hoax that constructs a barbaric otherness. It works in a contemporary communicative logic, but the meaning it operates is not new: it is about constructing the other in an inferior, less human way,” reflects the anthropologist. A hate speech that transforms the migrant, the other, not into someone different who eats differently, but almost into an animal that could eat your pets.
