Drunken Prawns

Ever heard of drunken prawns?

For those of you who have not, what came to your mind when I mentioned 'drunken prawns'? A highly satirical cartoon/comic concerning alcoholic crustaceans? Not a bad guess. A metaphor for rum-addicted two-bit pirates? Decent. Neither is correct, however.

Well, let me tell you what I'm really referring to. It's a Singaporean delicacy.

Singaporean delicacies can be split into two categories: the really brilliant, like chicken rice and chilli crab, and the really weird, like Newater. Some would categorize drunken prawns in the former, but I have to differ.

See, drunken prawns are really a whole bunch of prawns, submerged in wine - alive. What people do is that they kill it while it's drunk by cooking it. Kind of like drink driving, with cooking utensils. They can also eat the prawns raw.

Bottom line, I think it is a severely strange method of prawn consumption. Whatever happened to good, old-fashioned cooking the fella after it's dead? Isn't that what our caveman homeys taught us?

Yes, perhaps it tastes nice. Yes, perhaps this is one chance where one can get high while enjoying seafood. But it's all so...wrong.

Look at it from the prawn's perspective. Imagine being drenched in wine, so you're either very very tipsy, or you're drunk as hell. On top of that, you're squeezed into a bowl with several other equally drunk prawns. That will make you very horny. Or very fucking pissed off, depending on how open-minded you are.

Then someone takes you out of your alcohol-induced passions and cooks you. Or bites you in half, raw. And, as logic and biology takes its toll, you die a very sad death, ending up in the stomach of some stranger. Inside, you're treated worse than Elizabeth Taylor's dildo as you get churned and trashed around by digestive fluids. And when you do get to leave the body, you're shit. Literally.

And all this while you're high on alcohol. Poor prawns.