I took the N/R down to Canal Street last night after work in search of trotters. Coming up out of the subway in Chinatown really is like entering a parallel universe. You start in the New York you know and love, you go underground, and when you finally come back up again, everything is upside-down. I know I'm still in New York, but I also know I don't really belong here. Still, this is one of the things I like about the city: you can be a foreigner in your own home town.

The Zagat's Marketplace Guide has flagged a couple of meat markets in Chinatown, but they seem to have gotten wise and have lots of American-style cuts with labels in English to make the outsiders feel more at home. The only pig's feet I found there were small and already scored through to the bone -- no good for stuffing. So I went exploring.

I've always been wary about buying raw meat or fish in Chinatown, mostly because of the smell. It's as if the runoff from the ice chests in the open-air fish markets drains into the narrow streets, ripens, and hangs in the air like a guilty secret. But the markets are always packed, and thousands of Chinese immigrants can't be wrong, can they?

The meat markets in Chinatown are mostly indistinguishable; they all carry cuts of meat that I haven't seen before, whole animals and parts of animals I've never tasted. Split carcasses of birds of every size - some with their heads still attached -- sit alongside whole fish and meats that still look like the animal they came from. Some of them have been salted and dried until the bones and flesh share a uniform brittle crunchiness; some have been pickled in vinegar, oil, and chilies; some are fresh, some are frozen. There is jellyfish here. There are buckets and buckets of chickens' feet. There is liver and stomach and heart of pig. There are various bone-studded chunks of flesh I can't even identify. There are fish heads. There is all manner of dead creeping and swimming and flying things that look at once slightly familiar and inexplicably alien. And everywhere you look the Cantonese lacquer of soy sauce, sherry, and sugar -- that quintessential marriage of saltiness, sweetness, and richness that can draw a covetous glance from the most sated diner -- glistens beckoningly at you.

This is an experience every carnivore should have. We've grown dangerously accustomed to dissociating the idea of meat from the idea of animals. The clean pink and red blocks and slabs draped with snowy-white fat that shimmer under shrink-wrap in the grocer's meat case used to belong to a creature that had eyes, feet, fur, feathers, a brain, a heart. It walked, it spoke in its way; it ate and shit and made more little creatures just like it. Thomas Keller decided he had to kill his own rabbits to get back in touch with what eating meat is all about; Jeffrey Steingarten had to watch a communal pig-slaughter. For me its a stroll through Chinatown. To fully face where your food comes from is humbling; if you can still be at peace with it, it's liberating.

I ended up in a meat market on the south side of Canal, between Baxter and Mulberry. After a bit of cross-cultural sign language, I walked out with two rear-quarter pig's feet cut halfway up the shank, each as big as my forearm. I also picked up a strip of raw pork belly and a massive bone-in pork picnic - a sinewy shoulder cut - for my cassoulet. On my way back to the subway, I stopped by the push cart of a lady who makes little pop-cakes in a cast-iron mold; 20 for a dollar. They're warm and sweet on a cold night, a reward for venturing into unfamiliar territory and returning with more than I set out to find.