Musul Dog-Meat Wine

Dog-meat wine, and the name says so: 戊戌 is a year of the sexagenary cycle whose second character is the dog sign. A whole yellow male dog is skinned and gutted, simmered a full day and night until it falls apart, pounded to a paste, and brewed with three mal of glutinous rice and three nyang of white leaven for fourteen days. What is drunk is the strained wine of a meat-and-rice mash, a cup at a time on an empty stomach. The claim is for the 元氣 of the aged, and in the 婦人門 the same wine is sent against childlessness from long-standing cold. Neither holds. The mash contributes protein and fat and the wine a little of both, but the active substance is the alcohol, and **ethanol is a group 1 carcinogen with no safe level of intake** — a point that bears repeating for a preparation prescribed to the old and to women trying to conceive, since alcohol in pregnancy is teratogenic. This is recorded, not recommended. In Korea the breeding and slaughter of dogs for food has been prohibited since the special act of 2024, with a phase-out running to 2027; and meat butchered and simmered in a household and then held fourteen days in a warm mash is a straightforward food-safety hazard. — Eui Young (Justin) Chung, L.Ac., Dipl. O.M.