The mucous discharge of some old cow's guts, allowed to putrefy

Cheese, of course, was almost inconceivable. ... Although in the late twentieth century Chinese parents started feeding milk to their children, cheese is still widely regarded as disgusting: it was memorably described by one informant of the American anthropologist E.N. Anderson as 'the mucous discharge of some old cow's guts, allowed to putrefy'. Some Chinese friends of mine claim, with a grimace, to be able to smell milk in the sweat of Westerners.

F. Dunlop, Shark's fin soup and Sichuan pepper (2008), 65

In Chinese, the word for animal is dong wu, meaning 'moving thing'

It was the sheer nonchalance of it, the way people scaled fish as though they were simply peeling potatoes, skinned live rabbits while smoking a cigarette, joking with a friend as the blood drained from the throat of a bewildered duck. They didn't kill animals before they cooked and ate them. They simply went about the process of preparing a creature for the pot and table, and at some random point it died. But there, perhaps, is the crux of the matter, embedded almost invisibly in those two sentences. In English, as in most European languages, the words for the living things we eat are mostly derived from the Latin anima, which means air, breath, life. 'Creature', from the Latin for 'created', seems to connect animals with us human beings in some divinely fashioned universe. We too are creatures, animated. In Chinese, the word for animal is dong wu, meaning 'moving thing'. Is it cruel to hurt something that (unless you are a fervent Buddhist) you see as simply a 'moving thing', scarcely even alive.

F. Dunlop, Shark's fin soup and Sichuan pepper (2008), 49

There is no conceptual divide between 'meat' and 'inedible rubbery bits' when butchering an animal carcass

 The Chinese don't generally divide the animal world into the separate realms of pets and edible creatures: unless you are a strict Buddhist (and bearing in mind certain regional preferences), you might as well eat them all. Likewise, there is no conceptual divide between 'meat' and 'inedible rubbery bits' when butchering an animal carcass: in China they traditionally favour the kind of nose-to-tail eating of which restaurateur Fergus Henderson, the notorious English purveyor of offal, could only dream. 

F. Dunlop, Shark's fin soup and Sichuan pepper (2008), 12