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Previous: Irula rat catchers in southern India fill their sack with the day’s haul of animals caught from their nests and tunnels under the rice fields.

mammals

No one is sure what the first humans ate. In Neanderthal times, the mammoth played a large role in human life: courageously brought down by hunters with spears, a mammoth could feed, say, a dozen or more caves full of people for a week or more. Many drawings found in such caves in Europe, North America, and elsewhere show men hunting great hairy beasts. Archeological digs have uncovered the well-chewed bones of dozens of animals.

Since then, of course, the number of mammal species consumed throughout the world has multiplied quickly as hunting, transport, and marketing advances have enabled all types of meat to reach a larger audience, and in smaller, more manageable portions. It is not necessary nowadays to deal with a dead mammoth outside the cave when there are steaks in the freezer and quarter-pounders at the fast-food outlet.

The embryo of a calf on sale at a meat stall in the morning market of Phayao in northern Thailand.

That said, despite these advances and a current upward trend in the consumption of certain exotic foods, it can be argued that the number of protein sources for a growing world population is shrinking rather than expanding, at least proportionately. Through history, humans have eaten virtually everything that walked, including each other. However, the consumption of the four herbivorous mammals that provide eighty percent of the world’s protein-cattle, pigs, sheep, and goats—has become more prevalent. Thus, as the number of species being added to the menu goes up, the proportions, worldwide, are running the other way.

Some chapters here include animals found on endangered-species lists. I am not advocating irresponsible or illegal hunting activities. These species have a long history as food that continues to the present time, so they cannot be denied from any survey that has any pretensions to historical accuracy. More importantly, some of these animals are not always threatened in every location and circumstance. That many mammals have disappeared from the menu can be explained in part by the unfortunate number of species added to the endangered lists, and their removal from the approved diet may be applauded. At the same time, the Gang of Four-beef, pork, lamb, and goat—has gained ground because of fashion and the outside influence that accompanies the press of history. In Japan, for example, meat was virtually untouched before the country opened up to the West in the mid-nineteenth century, and in China, where tofu was first produced some two thousand years ago McDonald’s outlets now rival the number of vegetarian restaurants in Beijing.

Notions of class and caste exerted other forces. Some animal foods, such as possum in the United States, became associated with the poor, the “lower class,” and thus were not accepted at “better” tables, just as what is called “bush meat” in Africa and “bush tucker” in Australia traditionally was consumed by indigenous peoples, and thus shunned by those who fancied themselves fancier. At the same time, a number of specific mammal parts-blood, brains, certain innards, and sexual organs, for example—were disdained because they were not considered a “proper” food for the proper lady and gentleman.

Certain religions also played and continue to play a role. Hindus do not eat beef, Muslims and Orthodox Jews do not eat pork, and even today many Catholics eat only fish on Fridays. Some of these guidelines and taboos have their origins in practicality. Pork has been banned for thousands of years in the Middle East and remains on the taboo list for many hundreds of millions today because it is an unclean animal and spoils quickly; modem refrigeration has eliminated most of the threat, but the belief remains in force. It may also be argued that beef in modem India is an inefficient food source because grazing cattle would take away land required by more productive crops such as rice and vegetables; before 800 B.C., however, when India was lightly populated, beef was welcome at mealtimes.

In the chapters that follow, I talk about mammals ranging in size from the mouse and the bat to the elephant and the whale, including animals both domesticated and wild. I’ve also selected foods from all comers of the earth, from horse tartare in France to dog soup in Korea.

Some the chapters may offend some Euro-Americans because the animals they regard as pets or partners are eaten elsewhere in the world. Perhaps with no other food is the “gastronomical gap” made more dear than with the dog, welcome on laps by Euro-Americans, and on plates in China and Southeast Asia, where it is ordinary fare. Second to the dog comes the horse as man’s closest companion and helper through history. Yet, horses are regarded highly at mealtime in many countries, from France and Belgium to Japan, where horse is cherished by many as a delicacy. A recent Indian prime minister began each day with a glass of his own urine, and on a program produced by the BBC in London in 1997, human placenta was blended into a delicious paté.

Held in the soil-encrusted fingers of a south Indian rat-catcher, a newly born mole-rat, found in a nest under a rice field, will be a part of the evening meal for the family. Rats threaten the country’s rice crop, and the catchers are noncaste tribal peoples who eke out a living by selling the animals, which are also an essential part of their diet.

dogs Et cats

In most Euro-American countries (except in some immigrant communities, of course), dog is man’s best friend, or so they say. That explains why so many North Americans and Europeans get so upset when this animal is eaten so matter-of-factly in many Asian and Latin American countries, and why one-time movie sex goddess in France, Brigitte Bardot, is campaigning so vigorously to get the government of South Korea to ban the eating of dog—a cherished staple in that country—in advance of soccer’s 2002 World Cup tourney.

Ms. Bardot speaks for an animal-rights foundation bearing her name that is telling soccer fans not to attend the games if eating dogs is not outlawed and all the restaurants in Seoul offering dog on the menu aren’t closed. While hers is a valid point of view shared by many Euro-Americans, in other parts of the world-especially in numerous Asian countries—it is incomprehensible. Dog is an affordable protein source not only Korea, but in most of southern China (including Hong Kong) and much of Southeast Asia, as well as in parts of Latin America.

How Much Is That Doggie in the Paddy?

“The Lao [residents of Laos and northeastern Thailand] say eel is the best water meat and that dog is the best land meat,” Chavalit Phorak, a man in the dog-slaughtering business in Thailand told The Nation, a Bangkok newspaper, in 1997. “It’s much tastier than beef and not as tough. In the past, families used to kill a dog to eat each week. People liked the meat, but they had to be careful not to exhaust their supply. After all, there’s not much meat on a big dog, let alone a pup, and a dog takes time to grow, so farming them is still impractical.”

In most countries where dog is eaten, farming is not necessary, as strays and other unwanted canines are plentiful. For this reason, there are men like Chavalit, who travels the back roads and barters for village dogs, then sells the meat, entrails, and skins. “My truck has a loudspeaker,” he said. “Everywhere I go I tell people that I will give them pails for their naughty or lazy dogs.”

A healthy dog, in 1997, was worth two buckets. It took Chavalit three or four days to collect a hundred dogs, the number at which he broke even and possibly earned a small profit, as each trip cost as much as US$400 for petrol and pails. He then returned to the slaughterhouse, where butchers were paid twelve cents for every dog they killed, with a blow to the head with a hammer so as not to damage the skin.

Another twelve cents was paid for skinning the dogs, plus sixteen cents for butchering the meat. The meat was then sold for up to $2 a kilo, with each dog contributing about three kilos, and the skins were sold for between $1 and $2 to factories in Thailand, Taiwan, and Japan, where they were turned into golf gloves. (Think about that next time you step up to the tee.) The genitals were also sold, for about forty cents, and used in soup and wine, mainly in China, Korea, Vietnam, and Japan.

There are precedents for Ms. Bardot’s proposed ban, however. In 1988, the South Korean government ruled that restaurants serving dog soup, or poshintang, be closed to present a better image for foreigners attending the Olympic Games. Ten years later, in 1998, Philippine President Fidel Ramos signed into law a statute banning the killing of dogs for food, although its extreme popularity in the north made success of enforcement questionable.

Similar action has been taken elsewhere. In 1989, two Cambodian refugees living in Southern California were charged with animal cruelty for eating a German Shepherd puppy. The charges eventually were dropped when a judge ruled that the dog was killed by the acceptable practices of slaughtering agricultural livestock. That did not satisfy activists who later the same year convinced the California legislature into passing a law making it a misdemeanor to eat a dog or a cat, punishable by up to six months in jail and a fine of $1,000. Later still, the law was amended to include any animal traditionally kept as a pet or companion. Presumably, those charged with enforcing this law were expected to look the other way when 4-H Club members led their prize cattle and pigs to slaughter, animals they had raised from birth and for whom they frequently developed great affection. Furthermore, rabbits could still be killed and eaten and so could tropical fish, because they were legally categorized as livestock and fish, not pets.

There is no mystery why so many Euro-Americans oppose the eating of dog. There have been too many dog heroes in literature, TV and film—in stories by Jack London and dozens more, in movies like Rin Tin Tin, Lassie, Benji, and Disney’s enduring 101 Dalmatians, in virtually everything writ large in popular culture, from the heroic K-9 Corps in the U.S. military to the Saint Bernard who carries a flask of life-saving grog to humans lost in the Alps. In addition, the dog-believed to be a domestication of a Neolithic Asiatic wolf-through the years has proven useful to man because of its speed, hearing, sense of smell, hunting instinct, herding abilities, and companionship. So even for those who enjoy snails and octopus and may even be so brave as to try rattlesnake chili and shark’s fin soup, the line is drawn when it comes to man’s canine friend.

All that said, dog has been a welcome dish across much of the world’s history and geography. The recorded eating of dog goes back to Confucius’s time in China, circa 500 B.C., when the Li chi, a handbook of ancient ritual translated in 1885, offered recipes for delicacies prepared on ceremonial occasions. One of the dishes was canine, fried rice with crispy chunks cut from a wolfs breast, served with dog liver basted in its own fat, roasted and seared over charcoal. During the same period, an emperor who wanted more warriors encouraged childbirth by awarding what was described in the literature of the time as a succulent puppy to any woman bearing a boy.

The Chinese (and other Asians) regarded dog meat as more than a culinary treat. It was considered to be very good for the yang, the male, hot, extroverted part of human nature, as opposed to the female, cool, introverted yin. It was believed to “warm” the blood and thus was consumed in greatest frequency during the winter months. As early as the fourth century B.C., a Chinese philosopher named Mencius praised dog meat for its pharmaceutical properties, recommending it for liver ailments, malaria, and jaundice. Along with many other foods, it also was believed to enhance virility. The Chinese also served a sort of dog wine, believed to be a remedy for weariness.

Later, the Manchu Dynasty that ruled China from the seventeenth century A.D. banned dog meat, declaring its consumption barbarian. However, southern Chinese continued to eat it and Sun Yat-sen’s opposition Kuomintang followers began their meetings by cooking dog, believing the act symbolized their anti-Manchu revolution. The code name was “Three-Six Meat,” a play on the Chinese word for the number nine, which rhymed with the word for dog. Even today in Hong Kong, where since 1950 it has been illegal to catch or kill dogs or to possess their meat, butchers and customers use the expression “Three-Six Meat” when selling and buying it. Because Hong Kong Chinese are from southern China, where dog is still regarded as a staple, enforcement of the law has been negligible: punishment (up to six months in prison and a fine of US$125) has been lax, and the law is widely ignored, especially during the winter months when demand is greatest.

It is well-known that the American Indian originated in what is now Mongolia, and it’s believed that they brought the dog with them when they crossed the Bering Sea and eventually settled the wilderness that became North America. When European explorers and settlers arrived in the New World, they counted seventeen dog varieties, many of them raised specifically as food, although it was noted that not all tribes indulged. Those that did included the Iroquois and several Algonquin tribes of the central and eastern woodlands and the Utes of Utah, who cooked and ate dog meat before performing sacred ceremonial dances. While the very name of the Arapahoe means “dog-eater.” David Comfort writes in The First Pet History of the World (1994) that puppies were generally preferred because of their tenderness: “They were fattened with a special mixture of pemmican and dried fruit. After harvest with a tomahawk, the puppy was suspended upside down from a lodge pole, and the carcass hand-marinated with buffalo fat. Then it was skewered.”

Many of the early European arrivals contentedly, or at least circumstantially, joined in. According to Mr. Comfort’s text, Cabeza de Vaca, the Spanish explorer, was shipwrecked in the Gulf of Mexico and wandered for eight years on foot throughout the American Southwest, eating canine regularly. In Christopher Columbus’s time, Mexico’s only domesticated livestock were the turkey and the dog and according to a history written in the sixteenth century, the two meats were served in a single dish. Meriwether Lewis, leader of the Lewis and Clark Expedition that opened the American Northwest, wrote in his journal in 1804, “Having been so long accustomed to live on the flesh of dogs, the greater part of us have acquired a fondness for it, and our original aversion for it overcome by reflecting that while we subsisted on that food we were fatter, stronger, and in general enjoyed better health than at any period since leaving buffalo country.” As recently as 1928, the Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen ate his sled dogs in the Arctic in his attempt to reach the North Pole, although that was, admittedly, for reasons of survival and not by choice.

Dog Capital of the World

Guangzhou, about two hours from Hong Kong, is regarded as the “dog capital” of the gastronomical world. I stayed on Shamian Island, a onetime sandspit in the Pearl River that was ceded to the British and French following the Opium Wars of the 18th century, now a European-styled neighborhood with gardens and colonial buildings, as well as several tourist-class hotels. Across the canal separating Shamian Island from what is otherwise an undistinguished Chinese city is the Qingping Market, one of the late Premier Deng Xiaoping’s most radical innovations, a street market operated by entrepreneurs, a concept that subsequently spread throughout much of China. The market in Guangzhou is different from the others, however.

Once past two city blocks of stalls selling traditional medicine—beetles, lizards, starfish, seahorses, deer antlers, flowers and the like, all dried—I came to a cross street where the goods were all alive. Hundreds of frogs hopped in wire cages and eels and large water bugs swarmed in plastic tanks of aerated water. More tubs offered crawling crabs, crayfish, worms, and scorpions. There were turtles from one inch across to the size of a small beer keg. In metal cages stacked head-high were dogs, cats, small deer, pigeons, peacocks, guinea pigs, rabbits, and a number of dog-sized rodents called coypu. Everything was butchered on the spot on request or shoved into a sack for home preparation if the buyer wished to keep the dinner fresh.

In a phrase: a take-away zoo. Best to arrive before 10:00 am for the widest choice.

Nor was canine cuisine limited to Asia and North America. For at least a thousand years, Polynesians cherished the poi dog, so called because the animal’s diet was vegetarian, consisting largely of poi, or cooked taro root. This was one of the food animals taken to what is now Hawaii on primitive sailing ships from Tahiti and the Marquesas (along with the pig). At large feasts in Hawaii in the early 1800s, hosted by local royalty and attended by sailors from England and the United States, as many as two hundred to four hundred dogs were served at a single sitting.

In 1870, a cookbook was published in France with recipes for dozens of dishes based on the meat of dogs. Across the English Channel, however, the British typically rejected anything enjoyed by the French and in the 1890s Punch, the humor magazine, published several cartoons demonstrating their disapproval. The same magazine also satirically described an anonymous Englishman’s encounter with a canine meal:

...he brightened up

And thought himself in luck

When close before him what he saw

Looked something like a duck!

Still cautious grown, but, to be sure,

His brain he set to rack;

At length he turned to one behind,

And, pointing, cried, ‘Quack, quack?’

The Chinese gravely shook his head,

Next made a reverent bow;

And then expressed what dish it was,

By uttering, ‘Bow-wow-wow!’

Today, dog remains popular in southern China, Hong Kong, parts of Japan, Korea, much of Southeast Asia, and to a lesser degree in Mexico, Central and South America, but not without controversy. For years, organizers of the world’s most famous dog show, in England, welcomed sponsorship from the Korean electronics giant Samsung, until the International Fund for Animal Welfare protested in 1995, claiming that up to two million dogs were processed for the Korean food industry annually.

When such protests earned worldwide media attention, drawing attention to the slaughter of dog for meat in Thailand, Britain’s National Canine Defense League complained. It was no crime to kill and eat dogs in Thailand, so there was little the government could do to satisfy anyone at the league. Still, when Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip visited Bangkok in 1996, officials in Sakon Nakhon—the province where most of the dogs were killed-vowed to enact measures to try to keep any dogs from being butchered during the five-day visit so as not to offend Britain’s royalty. It was unlikely, however, that they would be anywhere nearby, as the province is 341 miles from Bangkok.

Men in the dog business must be selective. If the dogs haven’t eaten well, the meat may be stringy and possibly unhealthy, and many of the strays have rabies or mangy skins. In some Asian countries today the movement is not only to regulate the slaughter and promote cleanliness, but also to identify establishments where dog meat is served, because sometimes it is substituted for something else. For example, I was served “wild boar” in Saigon that I’m sure wasn’t boar—the day after seeing a flatbed truck loaded with caged dogs on the highway leading into the city. A coincidence? Perhaps.

I have also eaten dog in China and Vietnam. As a photographer friend took pictures of a skinned dog just delivered to a restaurant in China’s Yunnan province, a woman beckoned to us to come in. On the stove, she had some bite-sized, stir-fried haunch in a wok, left over from lunch, with a taste like cooked beef, slightly greasy, as dog, I’m told, often is. Two weeks later, in the mountainous region of northwestern Vietnam, near the Chinese border, I was served thin slices of dog tongue stir-fried with garlic and vegetables and while visiting a weekend marketplace in the same province I saw more than a dozen well-fed dogs of various breeds for sale (for about $10 apiece), and later I observed members of the hill tribe prominent in that area leading dinner home on a leash. The same year, 1998, the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development said there were at least fourteen million dogs in Vietnam, their numbers swelling as more and more farmers turned to raising dogs instead of pigs.

In Thailand, I found dog in the open markets as well, butchered and ready to go, but also cooked into a rich stew that sold for about eighty cents a portion, and deep-fried into a sort of jerky that was very hard to chew. This was in the province that more or less declared a moratorium on dog during the British queen’s visit, where on the average day, I was told, approximately a thousand dogs were killed for markets in the region. This region is also known for a kind of Oriental dog tartare, where raw dog meat is chopped almost to a mince, mixed with a few spices and finely chopped vegetables and served with the dog’s blood and bile. Unlike Vietnam, where most of the dogs that are cooked are tender puppies, the adults wind up on the plate in Thailand, so tough that minced is the easiest to chew and most digestible.

In Korea, hundreds, perhaps thousands of restaurants serve rich soups (costing about $10 for a medium sized bowl), casseroles ($16 per serving), and steamed meat served with rice ($25). It is, as in other places, technically illegal to sell cooked dog meat, and restauranteurs do so under threat of having their licenses revoked. However, an appeals court in Seoul in 1997 acquitted a dog-meat wholesaler, ruling that dogs were socially accepted as food. Continuing government concern about the nation’s image has led to periodic crackdowns, causing some restaurants to remove their outside signs or move from main streets to small lanes, away from the usual tourist haunts. And many now identify the special dishes not as dog, but instead use names like “Soup of Invigoration.”

As a protein source for human consumption, cats have a briefer history than dogs. At least, there are fewer historical references and while felines continue to find their way to the supper table from South America to Asia, the consumption level is comparatively quite low. This may be explained by the fact that through the ages, human regard for the cat has swung so widely—from worship to blasphemy and back—and at neither extreme did the small creature with the heart-warming purr and sharp claws ever seem as right for a stew or grill as their larger relatives, the cougar, the panther, the leopard, the lion, and the tiger.

There are, of course, numerous cases of the domestic cat being eaten for survival, just as Amundsen ate his sled dogs in the last century. In 1975, for example, the British correspondent Jon Swain was held captive in the French embassy in Phnom Penh following the invasion of the Cambodian capital by the Khmer Rouge. “With no end to our internment in sight, the shortage of food was becoming serious,” he wrote in River of Time (1996). “Reluctantly, Jean Menta, a Corsican adventurer, and Dominique Borella, the mercenary who had been keeping a low profile in case he was recognized, strangled and skinned the embassy cat. The poor creature put up a spirited fight and both men were badly scratched. A few of us ate it, curried. The meat was tender like chicken.”

So, too, in 1996, cats were skinned and grilled in Argentina under the media’s harsh glare, causing an uproar in homes throughout the country and in the legislature. The press and politicians asked, were people so poor they had to eat pets? The answer, of course, was yes.

The same year, in Australia, Richard Evans, a member of Parliament, recommended the country do everything possible to eradicate the country’s eighteen million feral and domestic cats by 2020 to prevent them killing and estimated three million birds and animals every year. John Wamsley, the managing director of Earth Sanctuaries, went a step further, urging people to catch and eat feral cats, recommending what he called “pussy-tail stew.” Another uproar shook the media.

It isn’t always need that puts the cat in the pot. At Guang’s Dog and Cat restaurant in Jiangmen, a city in southern China, the owner, Wu Lianguang, told reporters in 1996, “Business couldn’t be better. The wealthier the Chinese become, the more concerned they are about their health and there’s nothing better for you than cat meat.”

In northern Vietnam in the 1990s, cat joined dog on many restaurant menus in the belief that asthma could be cured by eating cat meat and that a man’s sexual prowess could be aroused or enhanced with the help of four raw cat galls pickled in rice wine. As a food, it was enjoyed raw, marinated, grilled over charcoal, or cut into bite-sized chunks and dunked into a Mongolian hotpot with vegetables. According to a report from Agence France Presse, a dozen restaurants specializing in cat meat opened in just one district of Hanoi and about 1,800 cats were butchered every year in each of them, with the cost to the consumer rising from US$3.50 to $11 in just two years.

Cat meat-generally not so greasy as dog—was a favorite of Hanoi gourmets until 1997, when the government forbade all further slaughter. Why? Official figures showed that as the country’s cat population dropped, the number of rats multiplied at an alarming rate, ravaging up to thirty per cent of grain produced in some districts around the capital city. The restaurants were held to blame.

The same year on the other side of the world, in Lima, Peru, a last-minute appeal from Peruvian animal-lovers persuaded authorities to halt a festival of cat cookery intended to celebrate a local saint’s day. Organizers of the event announced with regret that the annual festival honoring St. Efigenica, scheduled in the southern coastal town of Canete, had been canceled at the insistence of animal rights activists. However, cat continues to be considered a delicacy and it remains on local menus, without any public display.

A Swiss chef who worked in a five-star hotel in Asia smiled when I mentioned cat cuisine. He said he ate cat in northern Italy and enjoyed it, and if anyone wanted to do the same and lacked a recipe, it tasted so much like squirrel or rabbit, all they had to do was find a recipe for one of those and substitute.

For now, the eating of dog—and to a lesser degree, cat-seems to have a healthy future, especially in Asia, where there is no social stigma attached. And in most cases, where laws forbid their consumption, those bans likely will go unenforced. This may change in time, of course. Chang Moon Joon, a managing director of the Korea Animal Rescue Association, and a strong opponent of dog eating, said in a press release issued in 1998 that “since young people these days don’t eat dog meat, the market itself will dwindle and in twenty years’ time it will disappear.”

That may be so. Still, there is no accounting for, or predicting, the world’s eating habits, nor the changes occurring rapidly in the harvest of unusual crops. A few years ago, ostrich was only a big, funny-looking bird. Today it’s being farmed in large numbers in South Africa, Australia, China, and North America, where it is being praised as an answer to the need for low-cost, high-value protein. Canines and felines could fill the same role.

In April 1871, Le Monde Illustré depicted scenes of the Franco-Prussian War and the Siege of Paris, when market stalls selling cat and dog meat drew lines of people.

horse

My friend Richard Lair, an elephant expert living in Thailand-where he says he has eaten just about everything except elephant—was attending San Francisco State University in the early 1960s when he was introduced to horse meat. A pal of his was a chef who often shopped for his dinner at a pet store, the only place where horse meat could be purchased (in America) easily-this, because it was regarded (in America) as food fit only for dogs.

Horse Tartare

5-8 oz. lean horse flank or rump (per person)

1 egg yolk

Worcestershire sauce or hot pepper sauce to taste

Salt and pepper to taste

1 garlic clove, minced

1 tbs. red onion, chopped

1 tbs. parsley, chopped

1 tsp. capers

Catsup, olive oil, soy sauce

Grind meat and form into a ball, working in egg yolk, garlic, Worcestershire sauce or hot pepper sauce, salt and pepper. Flatten one side so the ball will hold its position on a plate. Place the onion, parsley, and capers on the plate around the meat; these are then added to the fork while eating. Serve with catsup, olive oil, more Worcestershire sauce, and soy sauce as desired for additional flavoring.

This gentleman knew the various cuts of horse, my friend told me, and he knew fresh meat when he saw it, so when the “pet food” met his approval, he purchased some of the rump and took it home and prepared the horse meat in the same way he prepared beef bourguignon, coating the cubes of lean meat with flour and frying them in a heavy saucepan with onions and shallots, and perhaps a tot of brandy, set aflame just before serving with potatoes and vegetables.

Horse meat? Some Euro-Americans bristle at the thought. This was, after all, the mammal most closely identified with human activity. From approximately 2,500 B.C., the animal has been an indispensable part of society, primarily as a beast of burden and a means of transportation. As early as 900 B.C., the Assyrian horse was drafted into the forerunner of what became called the “cavalry.” At the same time, in Greece, horse racing was included in the earliest Olympic games. They also pulled chariots into battle and plows across fields.

The horse was introduced to the “New World” by Spanish conquistadors in the seventeenth century, where it proliferated on the vast, grassy plains, and became a cowboy’s (and in Argentina, a gaucho’s) best friend and essential partner. Before trains traversed the United States, mail was delivered by Pony Express, people in stagecoaches were drawn cross-country by teams of four and six. Later, horses pulled trolley cars and fire engines. Teamsters and tradesmen transported their goods in horse-drawn wagons, much as the Budweiser Clydesdales pull beer carts for TV commercials today. In time, of course, the horse was replaced: by the train (initially called the “iron horse”), the tractor, the car, and truck.

The horse performs both essential and romantic tasks. Today, there are horses that pull carriages through New York’s Central Park, others that perform tricks in circuses. There are horses that still help cowboys herd cattle and horses that race around tracks and horses that jump over fences. Polo is an international sport, dating back to ancient India, when a goat’s head frequently was used as a ball. There are police horses and horses on dude ranches and there are ponies for little girls to ride on their birthdays. There also are horses on merry-go-rounds and, over the past century, dozens of horses that were stars in movies and in the international racing circuit. Equestrian clubs, riding competitions, and breed shows are everywhere.

With this background, it is no surprise that there are organizations, mainly in the United States, determined to halt the killing of wild horses in the American West and Canada for export to Europe as food. A 1996 equine survey counted seven million horses in America, about twenty percent more than a decade earlier. Of those sold at auction, most were “going to Paris,” the local euphemism for the European horse-meat market.

We know that prehistoric man hunted the horse as a source of meat from cave paintings dating back to the Ice Age showing hunters and their equine prey. In fact, some historians believe the horse was domesticated as a source of food before it was used as a beast of burden. Although the flesh was forbidden by Mosaic law, Joseph raised horses for food during a famine and the Greek historian Herodotus told how horse was boiled and then cooked with ox.

In more modern times, Marco Polo told of the Mongols draining small but regular quantities of the blood from their mounts as they moved across central Asia, taking milk to make foods of the curd or yogurt type, and drinking mare’s milk as well for sustenance. (See “Blood” section for further discussion.) “First they bring the milk [almost] to the boil,” the early trader and explorer wrote. “At the appropriate moment they skim off the cream that floats on the surface and put it in another vessel to be made into butter, because so long as it remains the milk can not be dried. Then they stand the milk in the sun and leave it to dry. When they are going on an expedition they take about ten pounds of this milk; and every morning they take out about half a pound of it and put it in a small leather flask, shaped like a gourd, with as much water as they please. Then while they ride, the milk in the flask dissolves into a fluid, which they drink. And this is their breakfast.”

Another early traveler in the east was William de Rubruquis, who published a record of his Remarkable Travels into Tartary and China, 1253, in which he told how the Mongols made kumiss, a fermented liquor. Just as the standing horse milk was about to ferment, it was poured into a large bladder and beaten with “a piece of wood made for that purpose, having a knot at the lower end like a man’s head, which is hollow within; and so soon as they beat it, it begins to boil [froth] like new wine, and to be sour and of a sharp taste; and they beat it in that manner till butter comes. After a man hath taken a draught it leaves a taste behind it like that of almond milk, going down very pleasantly, and intoxicating weak brains, for it is very heady and powerful.” The consumption of horse milk and its byproducts is not so common today, although a weak version of kumiss is drunk in parts of China. (Where the alcoholic strength is at a low two percent, no match even for the feeblest beers.)

The French, especially Parisians, have eaten horse meat commonly and openly since 1811, when it was decreed legal following a long ban. Today in France, especially in the Camargue in the south where herds of wild horses dashing through water is a photographic cliche, some breeds are raised for meat and as is true of most meat sources, the young—the colts—are preferred for their tenderness. Easily digested, horse meat has fewer calories than beef-ninety-four per hundred milligrams, compared with one-hundred and fifty-six for lean beef.

To satisfy the market that now includes Japan, thousands of wild horses, donkeys, and mules are killed and butchered in the western United States each year. Oddly, it is an expensive government program that has created, or at least abetted, this industry. The program, managed by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, is intended to protect wild horses on public lands, where they compete for water and forage with grazing cattle. What this means is that “excess horses” are rounded up and offered to the public for adoption. The government spends more than US$1,000 to collect, vaccinate, brand, and administer the paperwork for each horse and adopters pay US$125 for a healthy horse, as little as $25 for one that is old or lame. The new “parent” agrees to keep the animals for at least one year. Some do, many don’t, most selling them for slaughter eventually, usually receiving $700 apiece. More than 165,000 animals have been rounded up since the program was started in 1982, costing the government over $250 million. A tenth of that sum is considered a good year in the sale of the meat by export to Europe and Japan.

Sources

In Europe and Japan, many butcher shops or meat departments in markets offer horse meat matter-of-factly. In other Euro-American regions, it is still stocked in some pet shops, but it is wise to have someone along who can recognize the cuts and freshness.

Zebra may be purchased on the hoof from rancher Audren Garrett, Rt. 7, Box 388c, Springfield, MO 65802, phone (417) 866-5113 or from Doug Smith, Bear Creek Ranch, phone (210) 367-2320, email <cdsmith@sat.net>. You’d better have a butcher standing by, along with a very large freezer or plans for a sizeable barbecue.

From The Plains to the Plate

BIG HORN, WYOMING—Last year, 85,000 horses met their end in the four horsemeat packing plants left in America. In 1996, these businesses shipped $64 million worth of horsemeat to Belgium, France, Switzerland, and Mexico. The prime candidate for slaughter, say buyers, is a 10-12-year-old well-muscled quarter horse. The hind quarters are chilled and flown to Europe; the front quarters are cooked and minced and sent by boat.

This is an all-but-invisible trade. Even the United States Department of Agriculture, the government agency responsible for inspecting horsemeat, is stingy with information. Studies and analysis of the industry are practically non-existent. Packing plants are about as open as a frozen oyster. The Central-Nebraska Packing Company of North Platte politely but firmly rejected this reporter’s request to visit it. “With people burning down plants, we don’t make a habit of giving tours,” said the manager. He was referring to an incident in July 1997, when arsonists did $1 million of damage to the Cavel West packing house in Redmond, Oregon, which specialized in horsemeat. A torch-happy group, the Animal Liberation Front, claimed responsibility.

The Economist, May 23, 1998

Of the fourteen retail horsemeat butchers still open in Paris, this establishment in the fashionable rue St. Antoine, owned by Jean-Pierre Houssin, has the most traditional façade, including glass paintings and three of the distinctive gilded heads above the shop.

A mobile horsemeat butcher’s shop does brisk business in a French Provincial town, selling freshly slaughtered steaks and mince.

So it is not a big business, but it is a medium-sized one that likely will not go away. Some conservationists say it is a billion-dollar industry, a figure that makes people at U.S. slaughterhouses laugh and say, “I wish.”

“Killed on Friday, processed on Monday, Thursday we load the truck and then it’s flown to Europe,” says Pascal Derde, proprietor of the Cavel West, a packing house in Redmond, Oregon. “Tuesday eaten.”

However popular that horse may be today, it is unlikely there ever will be an event to top one held during the mid-nineteenth century, not long after Napoleon’s pharmacist, Cadet de Gassicourt, and others publicly testified that horse meat had sustained a number of lives during the general’s military campaigns. Larousse Gastronomique, the famed cookery encyclopedia, reported that on February 6, 1856, a number of butchers and chefs organized a banquet at one of Paris’s grand hotels, offering horse-broth vermicelli, horse sausage, boiled horse, horse stew, fillet of horse with mushrooms, potatoes sautéed in horse fat, salad in horse oil, and a rum pastry with horse marrow. Guests at the feast included the novelists Alexandre Dumas, who not only wrote The Three Musketeers, but also the 1,152-page Grand Dictionaire de Cuisine, and Gustave Flaubert, author of Madame Bovary.

Horse may be substituted for beef in many recipes—the animals are related, after all—and it is particularly suited for raw dishes, the lean flank sliced thinly and presented with a hot sauce (horseradish is not inappropriate) or as “horse tartare,” mixed with chopped onions and herbs and spices and served with Worcestershire sauce. In Japan, umasashi, horsemeat sashimi, is widely prized; in the south of France, the local sausage is based on ground horse meat, and is grilled, baked, or fried.

Other members of the horse family also are eaten, notably the zebra in Africa, where their extraordinary number have made them an inexpensive and readily available protein source for centuries. Laurens van der Post, a South African writer whose book First Catch Your Eland (1977) recalled his gastronomic adventures as a child and maturing adult, said zebra fillets and steaks provided “the tenderest and tastiest meat of all.”

Today, zebra meat finds its way to open markets scattered across eastern and southern Africa, where the herds are most numerous. It is also, more or less, a staple in specialty restaurants and is usually spit-roasted, delivered for carving at the table.

Saucisson d’ane—donkey meat dried sausage—is one of the specialties of the town of Arles in the south of France, seen on sale at the Saturday market and served with olive bread and a glass of Côte du Rhone.

rat Et mouse

The first time I heard about the rodent as a comestible was when I was told about a restaurant in London where a French couple reportedly served a savory rat stew. The way the story went, the couple immigrated to England following the Second World War, bringing with them a recipe developed during the German occupation of Paris, a time of severe shortages. Meat was particularly scarce and of necessity, the couple caught rats in traps in the alleys and cooked them with whatever vegetables and herbs they could find, creating a distinctive and delicious dish. “Unfortunately,” my friend told me, “the rats were as stringy and tough as the Parisians, so it was pretty chewy. Not to worry about that today, my lovely. The day of the alley rat is done. Today, they raise their own rats, feed them grain until they’re plump and juicy.”

My friend said the dish was listed on the menu in French for “rat stew,” and next to it were the words “when available.” That permitted the waiter to make sure it was understood just what kind of meat the customer was ordering. The only surprise the owners wanted to offer their patrons was how good it tasted. They did not want to hear anyone cry, “I ate WHAT!?!”

Sadly, the elderly owners of the restaurant had died and the establishment had closed, so it was many years before I actually got to eat a rodent. It finally happened the first time I stayed with my friend Samniang Changsena’s parents, who are rice farmers in northeastern Thailand. There, field mice are not only savored as a gastronomical treat, but also are considered a superb way of disposing of agricultural pests, hated for their damage to the rice crop. Samniang told me that the rats and mice they eat are healthy, because they live in burrows in the mud dikes between the paddy ponds. Because they lived mainly on a diet of rice, they are fattest at harvest time, from November to January, which was when I took my trip.

My friend said she and her sister would pour water into a hole and when the small, furry residents ran out, they hit them on the head with a stick, and if they didn’t come out, they dug for them. They then took them home and placed them directly on the coals of the outdoor wood fire that served as the family stove, turning them over with a stick until crisp. She said the babies were the tenderest, popped into the mouth and eaten bones and all, with or without a spicy dipping sauce.

And so it was when I visited my friend’s family. On one of her visits home, she had brought an electric wok, but they still cooked nearly everything they ate over a wood fire outside their home. It was there that I watched several mice turned over coals until they were crispy, then ate them, bones and all, with a chili pepper and fish sauce dip.

When I returned to my home in Hawaii and told my friends, they said, “You ate WHAT!?!”

Rodents, after all, have an unfortunate reputation worldwide. For all the good Mickey and Minnie Mouse and other cartoon characters may have offered the rodent population’s reputation, the rat and mouse are still creepy creatures that not many people seem to love and few might welcome to the dinner table.

In fact, in recent years the rat has been a detestable epithet, usually applied to someone who betrayed (“ratted on”) his or her friends. Who can forget James Cagney calling some movie enemy, “You dirty rat!” (Or was it Edward G. Robinson?) When you joined the nine-to-five work routine, you were in the “rat race,” from which escape was deemed desirable. With their twitchy pointed noses and whiskers, ominous yellow buck teeth, and hairless tails, rats aren’t considered pretty to look at, either.

Worse, rats bit children in their cribs and spread a host of awful diseases, and newspaper stories appear all the time explaining how health departments in modem cities from Bombay to Berlin to Beverly Hills, struggle to stay a step ahead of rat infestation. A report in 1997 said one in twenty homes in Britain is infested—and that there are about sixty million rats in that country compared to a human population of fifty eight million.

Having said this, rats, mice, and other members of the rodent family have a long, palatable history, based in part on their vast numbers and variety. This is an order, after all, whose members constitute nearly forty percent of all mammals on earth, all of which are edible, among them the rabbit, squirrel, marmot, beaver, chinchilla, guinea pig, porcupine, gerbil, hamster, and in Latin America the agouti, coypu, and capybara—a large, tailless creature cooked in the same way as a suckling pig. In some areas, some of these rodents are considered common dinnertime fare. Between one and a half and two million squirrels are killed by hunters each year in the American state of Illinois alone. But most are eaten less frequently. And some are anathema to the prevailing Euro-American taste, most remarkably the mouse and rat.

The common black rat, sometimes brown in color, most likely came from Asia, reaching Europe on trading ships by the thirteenth century. Not long after, fleas on the rats were blamed for spreading bubonic plague and killing twenty-five million people, a quarter of the population at the time. Around the world today, rats and their parasites spread at least twenty kinds of disease, from typhus to trichinosis to Lassa fever. It is no surprise that The Guinness Book of Records calls this species “the most dangerous rodent in the world.”

Yet, there are rats and mice that are easy to catch and not only safe to eat, but commonly eaten, both in times of hardship and as a staple or delicacy. And so it has been for millennia. In ancient Rome, caged dormice were fed nuts until they were plump enough for an emperor’s demanding appétite. These animals, which reached a length of eight inches (not counting the tail), were so popular, they also were farmed in large pens and exported to satisfy the appétites of Roman soldiers then occupying Britain.

In imperial China, the rat was called a “household deer” and considered a special treat, and Marco Polo wrote that the Tartars ate rat in the summer months, when they were plentiful. In Columbus’ time, when a ship’s food store ran low during oceanic crossing, the ship’s rat catcher became a man whose low station was elevated, and whose pay was raised when rodents— usually thought to be pests-became a valued protein source. In nineteenth-century France, many in Bordeaux traditionally feasted on grilled or broiled rat with shallots. Thomas Genin, a noted cook and organizer of that country’s first culinary competitions in the 1880s, considered rat meat to be of excellent quality. Henry David Thoreau is reported to have said he enjoyed fried rats, served with relish, although some insist he was talking about muskrats, which probably lived around Walden Pond. During Vietnam’s war with America, the Viet Cong considered rats an important food group. More recently, G. Gordon Liddy, one of the engineers of U.S. President Richard Nixon’s Watergate scandal, boasted that he ate rat in the all-American way, fried, although it’s generally believed that he did so to prove his courage, and not to expand his culinary experience.

In much of Latin America, Asia, and in parts of Africa and Oceania, rat remains a common hors d’oeuvre or entree today. In parts of China, it still is prepared in more than a dozen ways in popular restaurants. Even in America, there are commercial sources for rats and mice. One outfit, called the Gourmet Rodent, will deliver the critters dressed and frozen by UPS, Express Mail, or alive, C.O.D., via Delta Air Freight. (In 1998, mice cost between US$0.47-0.67 apiece, rats from $0.62-$2.17 for the 10-14 ounce “jumbos.” Discounts were offered on orders of more than five hundred units.) It should be noted that such companies advertised in magazines for people who kept snakes and that, according to the editors, it was known that some of the buyers were recent immigrants to the United States who did not keep snakes.

Deep Fried Field Rat

4 mature rats or 8 small rats

10-15 garlic cloves, crushed

2 tbs. salt

½ tsp. pepper

Skin and gut the rats, removing the head and toes. Mix garlic, salt, and pepper into a paste, spread on the meat, then place in direct sunlight for 6 to 8 hours, until dry. Fry in deep vegetable oil for about 6-7 minutes, until crispy and yellow in color. Serve with sticky rice, sweet-sour sauce, fish sauce, or a hot chili paste, and raw vegetables.

Traditional Isan recipe, courtesy Samniang Changsena

Sources

Frozen or live rats and mice by mail from Bill and Marcia Brant, The Gourmet Rodent, 6115 SW 137th Ave., Archer, FL 32618, phone (352) 495-9024, tax (352) 495-9781, email <GrmtRodent@aol.com>; SAS Corporation, 273 Hover Ave., Germantown, NY 12526, phone (518) 537-2000; Kevin Bryant Reptiles & Feeder Rodents Inc., P.O. Box 4424, Evansville, IN 47724, phone (812) 867-7598, tax (812) 8676058.

Also (frozen) from J&J Enterprise, P.O. Box 141, Grandfalls, TX 79742, phone (915) 5531, Kelly Haller, 4236 SE 25th, Topeka, KS 66605, phone (913) 234-3358; Ray Queen, The Mouse Factory, P.O. Box 85, Alpine, TX 79831, phone (915) 837-7100.

Grilled whole baby mice, served with a Vietnamese dipping sauce of finely chopped ginger, garlic, chillies, and coriander in fish sauce and rice vinegar.

At the end of a day’s work hunting under rice fields near Madras, a group of rat catchers grill a small part of the day’s bounty around an open fire.

The Rat Catchers of India

The greatest consumption of rats may be in India, where every year, swarms of mole rats, rice rats and field mice steal enough grain to feed the country’s nine hundred million people for three months. Many are killed by chemicals that also poison the water and earth, at the same time rendering the animals hazardous to eat. Meet the nomadic Irula tribe, India’s master rat catchers.

Not so long ago, the twenty-eight thousand Irulas, from the Chingleput District, earned a living as snake catchers, selling the serpents to the snake-skin industry. In the mid-1970s, when the government banned the trade, they offered their services as rat catchers and in the late 1980s, they proved their worth when a study conducted by the international aid organization Oxfam Trust showed that in fifty audited hunts, the Irula captured several thousand rats at a cost of about five cents (U.S.) per pest, where in parallel trials, the per-rat price using pesticides cost ten times as much.

The hunt is so simple it mocks modern eradication techniques. The men go into the fields and when they find a burrow they build fires in clay pots using grass and leaves to create a lot of smoke. The pots are then placed over all the exits of the underground tunnels and the smoke is blown into the burrows. After a while, the Irula dig into the earth to harvest the rats and mice, asphyxiated by the smoke. Some of the catch is sold to crocodile farms in Madras. The rest is taken to the market for human consumption, or taken home, where the small animals are prepared in a curry or grilled.

One of the techniques used by the Irula is to smoke the rats out from their tunnels, having first identified all the numerous exits. A clay pot with a small hole drilled in the base and filled with smouldering rice stalks makes an effective smoke machine. Strategically placed, the smoke will drive the rats towards the exit where the rat catchers will be waiting.

Working along the bund—the raised dike separating the rice fields—a group of Irula dig for a nest of rats that they have located by listening for movement close to the ground. Typically they will also recover a hoard of rice stolen by the rats, and this will be an additional bonus for dinner.

Chockalingam, the most experienced of this group of Irula trappers, digs for a nest, helped by his wife and son.

Two handfuls of rats that will either be eaten, or sold for one-and-a-half rupees each under a program set up by the Oxfam Trust and India’s Department of Science and Technology.

A hazy morning heralds a hot day at the end of the rice harvest, the preferred season for trapping rats, once the fields are clear of their crop.

bats

The Tri Ky Restaurant doesn’t exist in Saigon any more, having been replaced by a high-rise office building not long after the city was renamed for the country’s founder, Ho Chi Minh. A pity, too, because it had one of Southeast Asia’s preeminent “strange food” menus, offering dog, bat, turtle, and a variety of wild game, as well as a selection of blood cocktails for the end of the difficult workday. The restaurant was in a fair-sized, ground-floor room in a building near the Saigon River. I discovered it in 1993, during its last days, when such drinks were supposed to gird your loins-so to speak—for what came later in the evening, probably in Cholon, the city’s notorious Chinatown.

Stir-Fried Bat

6-8 bats

2 medium onions, sliced

2 turnips or similar vegetable, cut into small pieces

1 red chili pepper, de-seeded and finely chopped

2 garlic cloves, finely chopped

Salt and pepper to taste

Cooking oil

Singe hair over open flame, remove wings and heads, and cut bat meat into bite-sized chunks. Fry meat in a wok with a minimum amount of oil over a medium flame until tender. Vegetables and other ingredients are added only for the final two or three minutes.

Collected personally in Thailand and Indonesia, 1997

I entered, taking a seat by the large windows in the front near the door, looking out at a cluster of men in baseball caps napping in the seats of their three-wheeled cyclos, waiting for customers. I read the menu casually, as if I were used to encountering such dishes regularly. I recalled when I had decided not to drink snake blood in Taipei a few years before and figured this was the time to correct what I now hoped was a show of culinary cowardice.

“I’ll have one of these,” I said, pointing to a line in the menu. “The, uh, cobra.”

“Bat very good, sir,” the waiter said, pointing at the menu.

Obviously, I hadn’t read far enough down the drinks list. “Bat blood?” I said. I tried to play it cool.

“What sort of bat?” I asked, as if it really mattered and I would know what he was talking about, whatever he said.

“The fruit bat, sir. Also have bat stew. Very good.”

I told the gentleman (actually about a third my age) that I’d try it. With a can of 333, the local beer. Two of them. First a bracer. Then a chaser.

What happened next surprised me. After the cold beer was delivered, the bat was brought to my table still alive, its legs and wings gripped in the waiter’s hand as he cut the creature’s throat with a small, sharp knife. The blood fell into a small glass.

“Chuc sue khoe!” the waiter said. It was the standard Vietnamese toast meaning good luck.

I raised the small glass and drank the warm liquid, tried to roll it around my tongue as if it were vintage wine, but then chased it rather quickly with a swallow of 333. The waiter smiled, still holding the limp bat in one hand, cupping the head with the other in a small bowl to prevent any blood from falling onto the floor.

“One more, sir?” he asked.

“Maybe after the meal.” Still trying to be cool. As for the bat stew, think Dinty Moore with very stringy meat.

“How many foreigners order bat?’’ I asked as I paid the bill.

“You are the first this year,” the waiter said.

In American cinema, Tom Cruise’s presence in Interview with the Vampire (1994), and a number of actors playing Batman may have done something to soften the poor reputation held for so long by bats, but the fear of these creatures prevails in much of the world. The author Bram Stoker, who wrote the original Dracula (1897), must take some of the blame for this sorry state of affairs, but the American writer Anne Rice must share it for her series of best-selling vampire novels; it was the movie adaptation of her first that starred Cruise. With a hundred years of such inglorious history and images of neck-biting men who sleep during the day in coffins and who only can be killed by having stakes driven through the heart or shot with a silver bullet, is it any wonder that people turn away from the notion of deep-fried bat for dinner, or a glass of warm bat wine?

Nor is this all. Bats are grimly prominent in much folklore. The Bible calls it an unclean bird-although it is a mammal—and from India to Ireland to the United States it is regarded as a symbol of death. In many folk tales, the devil takes the form of a bat and there is a belief in much of the Euro-American world that bats will become so entangled in a woman’s hair that nothing but scissors or a knife can get them free.

Bats may command such a prominent role because they’ve been around for so long-fifty million years, according to fossil evidence—and because they’re so widely distributed and so numerous; it is estimated that one out of every four mammals on earth is a bat. There are more than nine hundred species, ranging in size from the bumblebee bat of Thailand that weighs less than a U.S. penny, right up to some flying “foxes” in South America and the Pacific, with bodies the size of small dogs and a wingspan of nearly six feet.

They’re not very attractive, either. Their furry bodies look like those of rats or mice; their leathery wings stretch on a framework similar to an opening umbrella; their outsized, translucent ears are ribbed with cartilage and laced with blood vessels; their pig-like snouts are spoked with whiskery projections; and they sleep hanging upside down, clinging to a cave’s ceiling with their feet...well, the picture is not appealing.

That said, bats are one of the most interesting of nature’s creations, mainly because of their echo-location, or sonar, senses. Similar to radar, which uses radio waves to detect location of another object, sonar uses sound waves to accomplish the identical task: the sound goes out and bounces back, giving bats the precise location of obstacles-they don’t want to be flying into buildings and trees, after all—and prey that may be moving at speed.

Most of the sounds humans perceive may be counted in hundreds of vibrations per second and humans can, with difficulty, hear sounds with a frequency of, maybe, twenty thousand vibrations per second. Bats hear sounds between fifty and two hundred thousand vibrations per second, and send out a series of clicks at the rate of thirty or so per second. This keen sense of hearing is unequalled in the natural and scientific worlds. Scientists say fishing bats have echo-location so sophisticated that they can detect movement of a minnow’s fin as fine as a human hair, protruding only eight hundredths of an inch above a pond’s surface, while African heart-nosed bats can hear the footsteps of a beetle walking on sand from a distance of more than six feet. It also keeps them from banging into things. Most (but not all) bats are, as the old saying goes, quite blind and able to react to a “sonar” bounce with unerring and astounding speed.

So, how in the hell does anyone catch one? Easy. It doesn’t take much effort to position several men with a fishing net outside one of the caves from which the bats emerge by the thousands at dusk to feed. A man with a shotgun at such times also can bring down twenty to thirty with a single blast, although when the cook prepares the meal, care must be taken to remove the pellets.

The easy catch is part of the bat’s appeal, but there’s more to it. Images of the devil and Count Dracula aside, there are millions in the world who believe that eating bats increases fertility and one’s chances for long life and happiness. To the Chinese, a symbol of five bats indicates the five blessings: wealth, health, love of virtue, old age, and a natural death. Eating bats also is believed to improve eyesight and in India, bat oil-made from melted fat mixed with blood, coconut oil, and camphor—is sold as a cure for rheumatism and arthritis. In Cambodia, it is prescribed for a child’s cough. And...it’s low in fat.

The bat is regarded as food today mainly in Asia and the Pacific. One species of “flying fox” in Guam has been hunted to extinction, but elsewhere they are numerous and the bat is not considered threatened. Probably the most cherished is the fruit bat, found in much of the western South Pacific, including the Philippines, Indonesia, and most of Micronesia.

The preparation of bat always is simple. Bat has not yet breached the barrier that might one day make it more acceptable to a wider audience, much as emu and kangaroo have done in Australia and various wild game meats have in Africa, where “native” foods are now fashionable and for which chefs dream up fancy recipes. Some day, there may be recipes for Bat Lasagna and Bat Casserole, but for now, it’s mostly soup, with maybe a little ginger, soy sauce, or coconut cream.

Grilled bat is a local speciality of the foothills of the mountain range separating Burma and Thailand. Limestone provides abundant caves for the bats, and several small restaurants near Ratchaburi (about an hour and a half’s drive west of Bangkok) serve them whole, grilled, or fried.

Eating bat may also be difficult for those put off by its appearance on the plate. Rabbits don’t look like rabbits when they are served, after the flesh has been hygienically distanced from any resemblance to living creatures, but bats often do still look like bats. Because most bats available for eating are small, and they are generally grilled or deep-fried, the entire creature may be cooked and consumed, including the wings, head, and brittle bones, bringing a crunchy sound to the table along with the undeniable reminder of what you are eating. Alternatively, the bat may be skinned, the head and wings removed—they contain only a little meat, after all—and the body cut into cubes for soup or stew.

A word of caution: most species exude a somewhat pungent odor as they cook. This can be alleviated by the addition of chili peppers, onion, or garlic, or any combination. (An American friend living in Indonesia says that the cook’s consumption of several bottles of the local beer also helps.)

More Reasons to Love a Bat

The larger species additionally are hunted for their skins and bat guano, the droppings deposited inside caves, valued for more than a century as an excellent fertilizer. In the wild, important agricultural plants, from bananas, breadfruit, and mangos to cashews, dates, and figs rely on bats for pollination and seed dispersal. A single brown bat can catch and eat six hundred mosquitoes in one hour and the twenty million Mexican free-tails that live in a large cave near Austin, Texas—the largest urban colony in the world, a tourist attraction—eat two hundred fifty tons of insects nightly.

There’s a bat that lives on my street in Bangkok. I don’t know where he or she hangs out during the day, but I see the solitary creature, swooping unevenly in the purpling dusk-sucking up mosquitoes, I guess. I don’t know why I see only one. I do know that every time I see this small animal I remember cocktail time in Saigon.

Grilled or Barbecued Bat

6-8 bats

Salt and pepper

4 garlic cloves, finely chopped

4 chili peppers, de-seeded and finely chopped

Remove hair by singeing the bat over fire, then remove its skin. Remove head and wings if desired. Grind salt, pepper, and garlic together and work it into the meat, leaving it for at least an hour before cooking. Grill on medium heat, or over an open fire or barbecue until crispy. Sprinkle peppers on the meat and leave for about ten minutes before serving, until the strong odor dissipates. Serve with rice.

Bats have inhabited the great twelfth-century temple of Angkor Wat for hundreds of years, roosting in the dark hollow interior of the famous towers. The two decades of turmoil and civil war in Cambodia left the temple in disrepair. The bat population has since increased.

This local farmer found a way to supplement his family’s diet by climbing the towers. He uses a hooked rod set in a bamboo handle to pull the animals out from the crevices, and then throws them down to his waiting nephew. His preferred way of cooking these small bats is to coat them in rice flour and deep-fry them.

primates Et other bush meat

Karl Amman discovered his burning “cause” in 1988 while traveling on the Zaire (now Congo) River in central Africa. Here, in what was the inspiration for Joseph Conrad’s long short story Heart of Darkness (1902), on one of the legendary river boats he counted two thousand smoked primate carcasses and about a thousand fresh ones. Monkey. Chimpanzee. To Mr. Amman, it looked like a miniature human morgue.

Sources

Antelope, bison, New Zealand elk, kangaroo, wild boar, and occasionally such rarities as lion (also ostrich and rattlesnake) from L.F.C., 3246 Garfield St, Hollywood, FL 33021, phone (954) 964-5861, email <eatgame@msn.com>.

Kangaroo and wallaby, ostrich and emu, crocodile, possum, and buffalo from Milligan’s Gourmet Gallery, 5 Kirkwood Rd., Swanbourne, Australia, phone (61) (8) 9385-3455, fax (61) (8) 9385-3559, mobile (61) (4) 1990-7339.

Since then, Mr. Amman, a Swiss photographer, has spent a lot of time investigating the bush meat trade in Africa, where the gorilla is endangered (an estimated eight hundred are killed and eaten each year) and in Indonesia, where the orangutan is on the same long list of animals either at the edge of extinction or approaching it. Mr. Amman is a fanatic. He points out that chimpanzees share 98.6 percent of the human genetic code, and asks whether shooting them is not 98.6 percent murder and eating them 98.6 percent cannibalism.

How to Make Real South African Biltong

Game meat

Rock salt

Black pepper, coarsely ground

Dried coriander, ground

Vinegar, preferably apple-cider vinegar

Start with half-inch thick strips of meat, cut with the grain, about six inches long. Liberally sprinkle rock salt on each side of the meat and let them stand for an hour. The longer you let it stand, the saltier it will become.

After the hour, scrape off all the excess salt with a knife (don’t soak it in water!). Then get some vinegar — preferably apple-cider, but any vinegar will do. Put some vinegar in a bowl and dip the strips of meat in the vinegar for a second or so — just so that the meat is covered with the vinegar. Hold the biltong up so that the excess vinegar drains off. Then sprinkle ground pepper and ground coriander over the meat on all sides. Once you have done this, the meat is ready to dry. There are several methods of drying. One is to hang it up on a line in a cool place and have a fan blow on it. This method is a bit difficult because if the air is humid the meat can spoil. The method I use is a homemade “biltong box.” This is basically a sealed wooden box (you can use cardboard if you like) with holes in it and a 60-watt light bulb inside. Just hang the meat at the top of the box, and leave the light bulb on, in the bottom. The heat from the light bulb helps dry the meat (even in humid weather) in about three to four days. Remember, the box must be closed on all six sides except for a few holes. The theory behind this method is that hot, dry air rises, thus drying the biltong. The holes are quite important as they promote good air circulation in the box.

Not everyone is so emotional, but the conservationist has a point. Yet it is undisputed fact that monkeys and other jungle rainforest animals have been the primary source of protein for tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands of years for the peoples of many parts of Central and South America, Asia, Africa, and Oceania. Even today, in west and central Africa, what is commonly called bush meat represents over half the animal protein consumed by millions of people and it is, in some areas, the only source of protein available. (Keeping livestock in the tropics is often impossible due to the lack of pasture, the cattle-preying tsetse fly, and a variety of animal epidemics.) The World Wildlife Fund (WWF) says:

• Bush meat comprises fifty percent of the protein consumed in parts of Equatorial Africa, seventy-five percent in Liberia.

• The half-million residents of the state of Amazonas in Brazil hunt and consume three million mammals every year (also half a million birds and several hundred thousand reptiles).

• Of the 214 species found in one forest in West Bengal, India, 155 are used by the local population for food, fuel, fiber, fodder, medicine, and religious rites.

Mr. Amman’s question is: how long can this go on? The Biosynergy Institute, an American conservation outfit that runs The Bush Meat Project and is one of Mr. Amman’s allies, is no less vehement, saying a “ragged army of fifteen-hundred bush meat hunters” in 1998 alone would shoot and butcher more than two thousand gorillas and four thousand chimpanzees in the forest region of west and central Africa, consuming more great apes each year than are kept in zoos and laboratories in North America.

That isn’t all. It isn’t just a centuries-old eating habit that’s causing what CNN called “the biggest conservation issue facing Africa since the ivory crisis.” Logging companies owned by Germans, British, Japanese, and Americans operating deep in the rain forest have caused a dramatic increase in the demand to serve the needs of their workers. Hunters in remote villages once killed only enough game to feed their families — a sustainable number of animals, thus no species were jeopardized — but now they are setting up camps in logging townships and hunting on a commercial basis. The construction of the new roads through the forests also eases transport of bush meat to the region’s large cities, to Doula and Yaounde in Cameroon, Brazzaville and Pointe Noire in the Congo, and Kinshasa in Zaire, where it is not unusual to see a truck pull into the marketplace with dozens of animals tied to its sides. Bush meat also is commonly sold smoked or by the part (arm, leg, etc.) or cut to steak and stew-meat size.

Legal bans do not inhibit the sale of bush meat. “Bush meat from a wide variety of species was available for sale in all the major markets, irrespective of it being closed or open hunting season,” Mr. Amman wrote in 1998 in one of his regular broadsides, published in various newsletters and on the Internet. “While the meat of protected species was disguised in some markets, it was openly on display in others. On our first evening in Ouesso, the gateway to the renowned Nouabale Ndoki National Park, we filmed a lorry carrying hundreds of kilos of bush meat, including the carcass of a silverback gorilla.”

Mr. Amman said the bush meat trade had “been commercialized to the point where it has become an integral part of the economy, the problem well beyond the scope of conservation organizations.” Even the loggers had to throw in the towel, he said: one executive of a major French firm told CNN that his company was now afraid of the poachers, who had automatic weapons; some German loggers, weary of the bad publicity, in 1997 asked the transporters of their timber to tell their drivers to stop carrying bush meat. The drivers went on strike, and the loggers and transporters gave in.

Mr. Amman did some shopping to compare the price difference between bush meat and that of domesticated species, such as pork and beef. “We went to the Yaounde bush meat market and bought two gorilla arms,” he wrote. “We then acquired the equivalent amount of beef. Next, we bought the frozen head of a chimpanzee and matched it with a much bigger pig’s head. We took all this back to the hotel and stuck on price tags to illustrate that beef and pork were less than half the price of gorilla and chimp.”

For many outside third-world countries, mainly in Europe and the United States, eating primates is not within the range of acceptable behavior.

“Understandably, many of us who study and conserve primates are uncomfortable seeing them on the menu,” Dr. Anthony Rose of the Biosynergy Institute wrote in 1998 in Pan Africa News. “This discomfort may be ego-centric, born of our own personal eating taboos or our concern that animals at our field sites may be killed before we’ve finished our research. It may be anthropocentric—a manifestation of our reluctance to eat anything so human-like as a gorilla or baboon. Or it may come from a bio-centric concern for individuals and species that are on the verge of extinction, high on the food chain, or demonstrably sentient and subject to suffering.”

In Trouble Again

Redmond O’Hanlon is an anthropologist-cum-travel writer of massive talent and eccentricity. His books which chronical treks into the jungles of Borneo, south America, and Africa, have won best-seller and cult status. In his second, In Trouble Again: A Journey Between the Orinoco and the Amazon (1990), he tells a story about shooting a howler monkey “about the size of a cocker spaniel.”

“Chimo and Pablo spread palm fronds on the ground and began to prepare the Howler monkey, scalding it with boiling water and scraping off the fur. Its skin turned white, like a baby’s.

“That night, when Pablo had jointed the body and Galvis boiled it, Chimo handed me a suspiciously full mess-tin. As I spooned out the soup, the monkey’s skull came into view, thinly covered with its red meat, the eyes still in their sockets.

’We gave it to you specially,’ said Chimo with great seriousness, sitting on a log beside me, taking another fistful of manioc from the tin and adding it to his own bowl. ‘It’s an honor in our country. If you eat the eyes, we will have good luck.’

“The skull bared its broken teeth at me. I picked it up, put my lips to the rim of each socket in turn, and sucked. The eyes came away from their soft stalks and slid down my throat.

“Chimo put his bowl down, folded his hands on his paunch, and roared with laughter.

‘You savage!’ he shouted. ‘You horrible naked savage! Don’t you think it looks like a man? Eh? How could you do a disgusting thing like that?’”

Redmond O’Hanlon, In Trouble Again

A Bushman cave painting at Giant’s Castle in South Africa’s Drakensberg Mountains shows early spear-wielding hunters and their prey. Mankind’s hunter-gatherer origins are responsible for a lingering fascination with “bush meat.”

Whatever the reasoning, there is now an alliance of more than thirty international organizations trying to change a diet that has existed for millennia, not only in Africa, but also in South America and in South and Southeast Asia. Together, they argue urgency, because hunting methods have changed. Not so long ago, the animals were hunted with bows and arrows, spears, and nets, the only goal being to put food on the family table, with occasional surplus carcasses being sold in the village market or shared without charge with other villagers. Today, automatic rifles and shotguns are used and the same trucks that took the hunters into the forest also take the fresh meat out. Even some traditional riverboats now have freezers.

Thus, more bush meat is reaching the marketplace faster and more efficiently, as the market itself continues to expand. A study conducted in 1997 in Ouesso, a small town in Congo (pop. 11,000), reported more than six tons of bush meat was sold each week in a market that offered eight different kinds of monkey and gorillas.

Nor is the market limited to African dinner tables. The World Wildlife Fund for Nature reported in 1998 that chimpanzee and gorilla were on menus as far away as Paris and Brussels, where the meat was served dried, smoked, cut into steaks and cooked in a rich, gamey stew. Monkey is also a popular dish in rural areas of southern China and Southeast Asia.

However threatening all this may sound, many if not most of the jungle animals found on Equatorial restaurant menus or in diets in tropical countries around the world are not on any endangered list. While it can be said safely that so many primates are on such lists—the gorilla, the chimp, the orangutan, one species of baboon and more than a dozen species of monkey—probably they should not be eaten, even when their populations are sizeable. However, there are other kinds of bush meat, or what is called “bush tucker” in Australia.

Three countries in Africa—Namibia, Zimbabwe, and South Africa-export game meat to Europe, and a number of private game ranches now invite hunters to go on an old-fashioned safari reminiscent of the time when Ernest Hemingway championed big game hunting fifty years ago. Here, today, if the hunter can pay the price, he can shoot eland, impala, kudu, duuiker, springbok, bush pig, zebra, and hartebeest.

It’s easy to guess what Hemingway would think of the number of “jungle restaurants” that opened in many cities worldwide. These included two African restaurants called Carnivore, one in his beloved Kenya and the other in South Africa. The first opened in 1980 just outside Nairobi and is now one of Kenya’s most popular tourist attractions. Here, two different game meats are offered each day depending on what’s available, cooked over a massive charcoal pit that dominates the entrance and is carried around the restaurant on traditional Masai machetes and carved right onto the diners’ sizzling cast-iron plates. During the peak months of December and January in 1997, the Nairobi restaurant served thirteen thousand customers a month, seventy percent of them tourists. The restaurant’s standard dinner included crocodile raised on a farm near the coast, along with zebra, eland, Cape buffalo, hartebeest, gazelle, giraffe, impala, camel, oryx, wildebeest, and ostrich. They call it “gnu-velle cuisine.” (Their joke, not mine.)

Similar restaurants exist around the globe. In Australia, there are dozens of places where what is called bush tucker is served, “tucker” being slang for food, the menu offering what once was considered fit only for the aboriginal population. Today, kangaroo fillets and ostrich steaks and crocodile satay are not only acceptable, but desirable. Here and elsewhere, the “exotic” or “jungle” restaurants resemble the Hard Rock Cafe and Planet Hollywood, where the theme seems more important than the food.

For example, African Heartbeat in Singapore runs Discovery Channel documentaries on its closed-circuit television system as it dishes up Ostrich Potjiekos (stew) with Polenta and Fresh Vegetables, African Caesar Salad with Venison Biltong Shavings, and Pan Fried Crocodile with Papadums and Spring Onion Relish. Prices at such places are in the luxury class. It is as if the proprietors decided that the best way to make food that once was considered fit only for the “natives” was to ask an exorbitant price for it.

Most game meats tend to be drier and less tender than meats of domestic animals, and more pungent in smell and taste. Because wild birds and mammals forage for food, their muscles may develop more connective tissue than the muscles of domestic animals, thus exercise can be given as a reason for less tender meat, although the younger the animal, the less tough, of course-just as veal is preferred by some over meat from an older animal. In addition, it is generally agreed that strong flavors associated with game animals are more pronounced in the fat of the species, so trimming fat from a carcass can be important.

A roadside restaurant sign in the town of Kulai, near Johor Bahru in Malaysia, advertises some of the “jungle food” popular in the region.

To assure tenderness, Carnivore chefs also marinate the meat for eight to twenty-four hours in a mixture of oil, water, soy sauce, lemon, tarragon, red wine, salt, white pepper, and cardamom seeds, and during cooking, baste it with a barbecue sauce made of honey, lime juice, oil, soy sauce, and cornstarch.

Almost all game animals lend themselves agreeably to stews and stroganoffs, or may be cooked on a grill, roasted in an oven, or baked. In South Africa, bush pig and several members of the gazelle family are routinely turned into biltong, or jerky, an age-old way of preserving meat for another day.

Elephant Stew

1 elephant

Brown gravy

Salt and pepper to taste

2 rabbits (optional)

First, find your elephant. Cut elephant into bitesized pieces. Be sure to allow adequate time. In a large pot, cover pieces with brown gravy and simmer. Cook over an open fire for four weeks at 465°F. This will serve about 3,800 people. If more guests are expected, 2 rabbits may be added, but do this only if necessary as most people dislike finding a hare in their stew.

Elephant conservationists may not think this is funny, because both species of elephant—the Asian and the African—are listed by every environmental group worldwide as endangered species. Where once large numbers of elephants roamed Africa from the Sahara to the Cape of Good Hope and occupied Asian forests nearly everywhere, now the numbers are small and the prospects are grim. Poachers continue to kill them for their ivory, a trade that is blamed for the slaughter of seven hundred thousand elephants in the decade before it was banned in 1989. Deforestation has removed much of their natural habitat, especially in Asia. Except for small numbers required in the tourism trade, few are needed now for transportation. At the same time, logging restrictions in many countries have taken away other traditional work.

That said, the African elephant is still being killed for food. Legally. And it is possible, if you visit one of the countries where elephant finds it way to a restaurant menu, to enjoy elephant stew—without hare—as well as elephant trunk steak, which is believed to be the tastiest part. You may even be able to find elephant meat in a tin to take home as a souvenir, to impress or offend your friends.

Elephant meat has been eaten for tens of thousands of years, going back to when primitive man hunted the modern pachyderm’s ancestors, the mammoths and mastodons, with spears, or by driving them off cliffs with fire. Even in recent times, many African peoples included the animal in their diet. The Pygmies of Africa were known for their prowess in bringing down the giants with poisoned arrows.

Such activity did not affect the population; those killed numbered fewer than those born. The harvest was sustainable.

Today in most African and all Asian countries, the elephant population is threatened. Most, but not all. In Zimbabwe, protection efforts were so successful that the government initiated a program to cull the elephant population. In 1995, George Pangeti, deputy director of the Department of National Parks and Wildlife, said there were between seventy and eighty thousand elephants in an environment that could support only half that number. An adult elephant ate up to four hundred and fifty pounds of vegetation a day, he said, and large areas of the national parks were being ravaged by overpopulation, upsetting the ecological balance needed to sustain other wildlife.

The same argument was voiced in South Africa, where in Kruger National Park—a game reserve the size of Israel— the elephant population grew to eight thousand from the few hundred the ivory hunters left in the early 1990s. With park officials warning that the reserve could provide for only seven thousand and that larger numbers would endanger other species, pushing them to the brink of extinction, or at least to hunger. The government proposed a culling program that included selling the hides (for expensive luggage and so on) and the meat, which in turn would bring up to US$500,000 a year, to be assigned to conservation programs.

Animal welfare groups in Europe and the U.S. argued that the culling would weaken the ivory trade ban as well as encourage more poaching by creating new markets for the meat and skins. Why not send the unwanted beasts elsewhere? South Africa did that, relocating hundreds to smaller reserves, as did Kenya, moving elephants from crowded areas to parks where the herds had been decimated. But the overpopulation problem remained in some areas and it was prohibitively expensive to transport the animals over longer distances, say, from one country to another.

With politicians nervous about endorsing any law that sanctioned the killing of elephants, the beasts were put up for sale and “adoption.” Understandably, there were few takers and finally the herds were thinned by government hunters in helicopters using drugged darts, at last sending the meat and hides to the marketplace.

Such government programs were not cheap. Skinning an elephant required a team of people several hours and five hundred pounds of salt to treat a single animal, while hauling a thousand or more pounds of meat a long distance was no easy matter. In fact, the scale of the economics brought one effort at culling to its knees in 1965. This was funded by the United Nations, creating an abattoir in Zambia that was designed to cut five per cent of the local populations of elephant, hippopotamus, and buffalo. By 1970, the program was scrapped, due largely to the cost of transporting the carcasses over long distances and poor marketing. Today in South Africa, most elephant meat feeds the poor living in densely populated areas surrounding the game reserves.

Historically, elephant meat usually has been consumed on the spot, or smoked and dried for later use. The trunks and feet are considered the choicest cuts; elephant fat has been made into cooking oil.

Even after twelve or more hours of cooking (or long aging in the open air), the meat is regarded as somewhat chewy. The flesh, which is muscular and gelatinous, compares with beef tongue, which it also resembles in taste, only gamier.

If you wish to try this delicacy in Africa, book a flight soon. In Johannesburg, politicians are talking about putting the elephants on birth-control pills.

A waiter at the Carnivore restaurant in Nairobi serves up the bush meat du jour, carved right at the diners’ table.

Kangaroo has found recent favor in modern cuisine. In London’s Sugar Club, renowned chef Peter Gordon, a New Zealander, serves a Thai-style spicy kangaroo salad, and likes the meat for its taste and tenderness.

A chimp, such as this one, occasionally may serve as a family pet, but only for a short time, and then it’s into the pot or is sold at a central African market.

Monkeys are smoked over open wood tires in the wild, then packaged for shipping to the city or put aside for later consumption. In the Congo Republic in 1997, the prime minister officially announced that all school children should spend their holidays hunting and fishing, an announcement made during the closed season.

Gorilla meat is easily smoked and passed off as buffalo, which makes it easier to sell openly in some areas. The nine-ball Chevrotine cartridge designed to bring clown a gorilla is sold over the counter.

Photos this page by Karl Ammann.

This chimpanzee baby was frozen and transported by riverboat to Kinshasa where it is found on many restaurant menus.

Near right: Antelopes make up a large share of commercial bushmcat, whether rare species or not.

All photos on this page and the next are by Karl Ammann.

A young boy carries a trophy gorilla head.

A village woman holds a cooked monkey.

Fresh and cooked meat is moved from the jungle by dug-out canoes, then by larger river boats or on logging trains like this one, offloaded within walking distance of the open market.

A central African market.

bison, water buffalo, Et yak

Roasted American buffalo, also called bison, was the main dish served to me at a Boy Scout ranch in New Mexico in the 1950s after a month spent hiking and riding horses across the rough, dry mountains and plains. At the time, one of the coins in American pockets had a picture of an Indian chief on one side, a bison on the other; thus, it was called a “buffalo nickel,” and as a Boy Scout, Indian lore was something I knew well. At home, my mother hated to cook and my father’s bland dietary demands made dinner time quite mundane, so eating the same food that nourished countless American Indians was quite exotic, permitting me to ignore the fact that it tasted like a slightly pungent version of my mother’s overdone roast beef. (Sorry, Mom.)

Sliced Water Buffalo Meat Stew

2 pieces of water buffalo meat, each the size of a hand salt

4 straight-bulbed spring onions

2 (small) heads of garlic

5 slices galingal

1 large onion, sliced vertically

fish sauce

2 fresh red chili peppers, chopped crossways

2 Kaffir lime leaves, finely chopped 2 limes

chopped coriander leaves

ground black pepper

young cucumbers

To prepare the meat, remove the tendons. Then wash the pieces, rub salt into them, and toast over a fire until the outside is golden. Take the spring onions and chop the bulbs and adjacent green parts only (not the leaves). Place the garlic in the embers of a charcoal fire until they are partly cooked but not well done, then remove them, take off the charred outer skin, and chop them vertically.

Put the meat, galingal, sliced large onion, and a sprinkling of salt into a pot with enough water to cover the meat. Put the pot on the fire. When the water boils, sprinkle in some fish sauce and continue boiling until the water is reduced and the meat tender.

Take out the meat and slice it thinly. Spoon out and throw away the galingal. Return the sliced meat to the pot. The amount of water should be just sufficient to keep the meat moist. Taste, and check the saltiness. Stir in the chopped ingredients and the juice of the two limes.

Put the soup in a large bowl, garnish it with ground black pepper and the chopped coriander leaves, and serve it with young cucumbers.

Sources

Jerky made from bison is available from the Tasty Jerky Company, (800) 537-5988. Check the company’s web site at <www.info2000.net/~tastymilk/hnybuff.html>.

Yak breeders in the U.S.: Harlan Leer, Ranchos Dos Osos, P.O. Box 1103, Steamboat Springs, CO 80477, phone (970) 879-1789, email <dososos@cmn.net>; Cynthia and Dave Huber, Duckett Creek Ranch, Hillside, CO 81232, phone (719) 9424181, email <dhuber@mariner-energy.com>; and Nancy Allen, Allen’s Ark, P.O. Box 133, Dixon, MO 59831, phone (406) 745-2838, email <sti4472@montana.com>.

The bison was once so numerous, its shaggy, humped-back herds roamed the Western U.S. plains like zebra and gazelle still inhabit parts of the African veldt. Before the white man arrived, an estimated forty to sixty million bison ranged from central Canada south into Mexico, where it was a primary source of food for the nomadic Indian tribes, including the Cheyenne, Cree, Kiowa, Sioux, Osage, Blackfoot, and many more. Like other grazing animals, bison relied more on a keen sense of smell than sight and hearing to detect approaching harm; native hunters frequently approached the herds on their hands and knees, with wolf skins hiding their human forms, their bodies smeared with buffalo fat to hide their human odor, bow-and-arrow at the ready. The hunters also constructed high walls of brush along either side of known buffalo migration routes, forming a sort of funnel leading to a rough corral, where they easily killed the targets of their choice. When the geography permitted, they stampeded the buffalo over cliffs. After acquiring horses and rifles from early European hunters and explorers, the tribal hunt became more efficient.

One kill, averaging between a thousand and fifteen hundred pounds, could provide for a tribe for days. Usually the first parts consumed were the offal, although the favorite parts-generally either roasted or dried for future use—were the tongue and meat from the hump, which was considered the tenderest and sweetest. Eaten soon after slaughter, the meat was roasted on a spit or boiled in a skin bag with water and stones heated in an open fire, a process that produced a nutritious stew or soup.

The Indians wasted nothing, using every part of the shaggy beast. Clothing and moccasins were made from the tanned hide, along with river rafts and boats; the cured hide also covered the Indians’ tall, conical tents, or tipi. With the hair left on, the hides became blankets for the bitter winter cold. Tanning agents were produced from the brains, fat, and liver, soap from the leftover fat, glue from the rendered hooves. War shields were crafted from the tough neck hide, arrowheads and knives from the bones, powder flasks, spoons, and drinking cups from the horns. Sinew was used as thread. Hoes were fashioned from the shoulder blade, and stomachs were sewn into water bags. The long hair was plaited into halters. Even the dried dung was used, as it is today when no wood is available, for campfires, producing little smoke.

The Indians killed an estimated three hundred thousand buffalo a year, well below the natural replacement rate. That changed tragically in the early nineteenth century, when a vogue for big game hunting swept much of the world and white settlers with rifles began populating the American plains, followed by entrepreneurs and adventurers. The bison were killed by white hunters first for their meat at a rate of about two million a year, but frequently only the tongues were taken for the menus of fashionable restaurants in Chicago and New York and the huge carcasses were left to rot. The slaughter accelerated to about three million a year in the 1870s, when bison hides were first made into commercial leather.

William F. Cody, an early plainsman, acquired his nickname “Buffalo Bill” for shooting bison as food for railroad construction crews and is reported to have killed 4,280 animals within one seventeen-month period. Once the railroads were in place, the white man shot millions more each year, blasting away from trains passing through the diminishing herds. Some contend that this was a plot to beat back the native Americans; slaughter the primary source of their survival and you wipe out the Indians, too. More likely, the hunters got some sort of thrill from banging away at the beasts.

Whatever the motivation, now the entire animal was left to waste and with the introduction of fences erected by sheep herders and other homesteaders, the surviving animals’ freedom to range was restricted, their natural lifestyle inhibited. By the end of the century, the American buffalo was driven to the point of extinction; unbelievably, from tens of millions, only about a thousand still grazed the plains.

Happily, the tide has turned. Small wild herds survived in parts of the U.S. (notably in what became Yellowstone Park) and Canada and in the twentieth century, efforts were introduced to protect the animal and reconstitute the once-great herds. Today, the buffalo’s future seems secure as more than a hundred thousand of them range parklands and private ranches from New York to California, from Canada to Oklahoma. Some of the herds, including the largest in existence-numbering twelve thousand—are on ranches owned by American media mogul Ted Turner and his wife, actress Jane Fonda, and the corporate emblem of the company that administers their ranches is a charging bison.

Many of today’s herds, including Mr. Turner’s, are being managed at least partly for the production of food, so today it is becoming more common to see charbroiled bison steak and stew on menus in the U.S. and Canada. Because of its resemblance to beef, in appearance as well as in taste, it has found ready acceptance wherever it is available; limited quantity and distribution, however, has kept the meat unknown in most places. The bison also is being cross-bred with cattle, producing what is called “beefalo,” and sometimes “cattelo.” (However, the male of the mixed breed so far is infertile.) The North American Bison Cooperative, backed by scientific studies, boasts that the meat is lower in cholesterol and saturated fat than beef, non-allergenic, and free of chemicals.

Bud Flocchini of Gillette, Wyoming, president of the American Bison Association, says the membership has doubled to twenty-three hundred since 1993. “We’ve never seen such interest,” he says. “Heifer calves are selling now for about US$1,600 each, and two-year-olds for up to $3,500. Last year, a champion blue-ribbon bull sold for $15,000. But most buyers are small operators. We advise them to study the animal very carefully before getting started, and pay a lot of attention to fences. These animals are much tougher to work with than beef cattle. To produce income, you need between fifty to one hundred head and around fifty acres of good pasture, with supplementary feed in the off-season.”

Much of the bison consumed by the Indian nations was in the form of pemmican, a word that comes from the Cree, meaning “journey meat.” To make pemmican, or jerky, the Cree dried strips of buffalo meat in the sun, a process that took a few days. They then pounded it into a pulp, mixing it with the fat from a bear or goose, or the bison itself, and, if available, pulverized dry fruit. More colorful was the description by C. Levi Strauss in The Origin of Table Manners (1978): “They placed thin slices of hard meat carefully on a bed of charcoal, first on one side then on the other. They beat them to break them into small pieces, which they mixed with melted bison fat and marrow. Then they pressed it into leather bags, taking care that no air was left inside. When the bags were sewn up, the women flattened them by jumping on them to blend the ingredients. They put them to dry in the sun.”

The bison has numerous cousins around the world, many of them also cherished as a renewable, non-threatened protein source. These include the Cape buffalo in Africa, and in Asia, the water buffalo and yak.

Of these, surely the water buffalo is the most commonly consumed. With an estimated 140 million in existence, this largely domesticated, cud-chewing, plant-eating animal is now spread over much of the world, but it is in Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia, the Philippines, Myanmar, China, Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam where the majority live. Here, they labor as the developing world’s tractor, while serving as family friend, object of competitive sport (battling head-to-head during festivals or in long, bouncy dashes in a race against the clock, riders clinging precariously to their asphalt hides), and household symbol of status, wealth, and tranquility. Sacrifice a buffalo at a funeral or in a religious rite or offer one as part of a dowry for a bride and your local status goes up, or put them to work in the paddy fields and, between shifts in front of primitive plows, let them and children mind each other in muddy peace. Surely no other Asian beast of burden is so revered.

The water buffalo plays an important role in the cultures of rice-growing Asia, here celebrated in the Philippines at the annual carabao (Tagalog for “buffalo”) festival in Pulilan, north of Manila. Farmers parade their animals dressed and decorated for the occasion.

Given this status in Asian society, it may seem surprising that the water buffalo so easily becomes dinner. In fact, until most Southeast Asian countries first imported real beef from Australia and elsewhere about twenty years ago, most of the “beef’ consumed in Asia was water buffalo—sadly much of it rather chewy, due to the animals’ advanced age; after all, there was no advantage in butchering a key member of the family work force.

Related distantly to domestic cattle, the water buffalo—so called because they like to wallow in mud and water-labored in fields in Iraq and the Indus Valley as long as four thousand years ago, and domesticated populations existed in southern China a thousand years later. Wide hooves, flexible joints, and tremendous strength allow them to pull a plow knee-deep in mud. They also have a docile nature and thrive on low-quality forage, surviving happily on wild grass and the stubble left behind following a rice harvest. Despite such a humble diet, adults often reach nine feet in length, can be nearly six feet high at the shoulders, and weigh more than a ton, as much as a small automobile.

Today, water buffalo are a major source of milk, contributing about half of the milk consumed in India. This liquid, which has much more fat, more nonfat solids, and less water than cow’s milk, also is important in China and the Philippines. In India, the milk is also used for making a kind of liquid butter, and herds created for commercial purposes, as far apart as Italy and Australia, provide the milk that is turned into mozzarella cheese. Similarly, the Cape buffalo contributes much milk to the diet in Africa. Still, mainly the beast is valued for its flesh.

In 1993, for example, when the United Nations was in Cambodia helping organize and supervise the country’s first election, one of the UN vehicles slammed into a water buffalo as it ambled across a rural road. The driver panicked and hurried back to the capital, Phnom Penh, where he was told by his superiors that he must return to the scene of the accident and pay the villagers for their loss. When he arrived next day, the buffalo already had been butchered and partially consumed. The representative was invited to stay for supper.

Water buffalo may be consumed raw (usually ground, as in steak tartare), dried, or cooked as beef would be prepared. Some of the earliest written recipes survive from the nineteenth century, when, in Laos, the king’s chef included instructions for making “hot boiled water buffalo sauce” to be served with slices of raw eggplant or cucumber, “slow-cooked water buffalo tripe,” and the meat in a kind of stew seasoned with lemon grass and chili peppers. Even today in Laos, there is a restaurant in the capital, Vientiane, known for its buffalo specialties, including placenta, fetus, udder, and brains. As is true for other animals, the older the beast, the tougher the meat, so tenderizers may be warranted.

Today, the water buffalo population is shrinking, worldwide. The average population growth rate in Asia has, over the past three decades, declined by more than half. As farmers replaced these four-legged tractors with three-wheeled ones (the earliest were called “iron buffalo”), interest in breeding dropped. At the same time, more and more farmers sought work in the cities, leaving much of the rice farming to large conglomerates. In the past, four hundred families in one village might have owned as many as a thousand buffaloes. Nowadays, the same number may have only twenty-five.

In the high plateaus and mountains of Central Asia, in eastern Kashmir, Nepal, and Tibet, ranging from the lower valleys to twenty-thousand-foot elevations where the climate is cold and dry, there lives another cousin of the bison and water buffalo, the yak. Known for an unusually luxuriant coat almost reaching to the ground and its long, curving horns, it looks like a large brown or reddish shag rug thrown over a longhorn steer with a hump. Despite their relative immensity-yaks also weigh as much as a small car-they are nimble climbers and sure swimmers, roaming icy mountainsides and valleys, grazing on native grass.

Like other members of the same family, they are favored for the variety of their uses and services. They carry heavy loads. The hair is spun into rope and woven into cloth. The hide is used for leather, shoes, coats, bags for storing grain, and for the construction of simple boats, as well as for tent-like, temporary housing. (More permanent homes may include some of the bones for structural support.) Its horns serve as a bugle, emitting a distinct sound when properly shaped and blown, used by monks or yak-herders to signal the time of day, to call for help, signal danger, or simply to communicate. And, as is true for its American relative, the dried dung is used for fuel.

During the funeral rites of the Akha hill-tribe in Burma, Thailand, Laos, and Yunnan, a sacrificial buffalo is committed to the deceased. The dead animal is laid out for a day and covered with paddy, while the spirit priest prays over it. Later, it will provide a feast for the entire village.

Yet, it is its use as a food that gives the yak its reputation. The milk yields excellent butter and curd, and the flesh is of high quality, eaten roasted or dried, fried, boiled, baked, broiled, or made into a stew or soup, with or without noodles. Its meat is available everywhere in Lhasa, Tibet’s capital, where it is found on most restaurant menus, stuffed into dumplings, sliced into steaks, air-dried, and minced into “yak burgers.” (When China invaded the country and the Dalai Lama and some eighty thousand Tibetans fled to neighboring Nepal and India, they took this cuisine with them. In Nepal’s capital, Kathmandu, several Tibetan restaurants offer a full range of yak dishes.) Because the yak, like other animals, tends to get tough and stringy with age, most of the meat will have been ground to ease the chewing process. The taste is like cheap hamburger meat.

However popular the flesh, it is the butter that likely will give this mammal its culinary immortality. Read any book about Nepal or Tibet, or check the staggering number of Internet web sites about these countries-hundreds and perhaps thousands of them posted by foreigners who recall their visit as if in a state of religious transcendence—and it is inevitable that the subject of yak butter is mentioned.

When CNN founder Ted Turner bought this Montana ranch west of Yellowstone National Park, he replaced the cattle with bison, which now number 12,000.

Yak milk is rich, valued for its seven percent fat content, compared to half that for cattle. The butter is used as a thickener for soups and mixed with ground barley in a tea called tsampa, a drink consumed in vast quantity at all hours of the day and night. The whitish-yellow fat may also be burned in lamps to illuminate tents, homes, and temples, and is applied as a body lotion or hair pomade. In Buddhist monasteries, monks boil up huge cauldrons of the stuff to offer visitors in tea. The natives’ clothing is redolent, committing to the air a sort of greasy, smoky smell. The odor is strong—some say rancid-yet it is so pervasive that because you cannot avoid it, after a while you stop noticing it. It becomes a part of you.

And you hold out your cup for more.

An Akha spirit priest in northern Thailand sacrifices a tethered buffalo with a single stab from a spear. Immediately, water will be poured down its throat so that it will make no noise in dying.

At the ritual slaughter of another buffalo, in a Pathan village on the Northwest Frontier of Pakistan, the butcher washes his hands after cutting the animal’s throat.

Pathan tribesmen from the village of Kado, near Peshawar, enjoy a buffalo biriani feast from the animal pictured above right.

The sleek braided hair of a Tibetan pilgrim praying outside the Jokhang in Lhasa owes its lustre to a yak butter pomade.

whale

All hell broke loose in 1998 when the school district of the seaside city of Shimonoseki in Japan announced an addition to the upcoming year’s school lunch menu: whale meat.

Greenpeace went ballistic and thousands of save-the-whale crusaders worldwide—along with fans of the Free Willy movies—went to bed angry. When the Japanese defended their move, saying it was designed to teach some 25,000 elementary and primary school students pride in their town’s historical role as a major port for their country’s whaling fleet, it only made people madder.

No food harvest in the present time stirs more controversy than the killing of whales. Not the tiger, panda, elephant, dolphin, monk seal, manatee, bald eagle, gorilla, orangutan, gibbon, chimpanzee, or any other endangered or threatened species. People who killed whales were crazy, the “save the whales” contingent argue: “Didn’t you read Moby Dick?” Of course, it’s not that simple.

Moby Who?

To understand how whale meat found its way into school lunches in Japan and onto grills in faraway Iceland, Norway, Denmark and elsewhere—and why it is not eaten in most places today—suggests a fast look at whaling history.

Many whales are threatened with extinction today because unregulated whaling activity—led by the United States, England, and Norway—annihilated the oceanic population in much the same way many other large mammals were hunted to near-extinction in the North American and African continents. Whaling by these countries was conducted to collect whale oil, the market for which died with the discovery of petroleum. The market for whale bone, used in the construction of corsets and other female foundation garments, also died when those garments became obsolete. It wasn’t concern for the survival of the great beasts that ended whaling. It was commerce.

With the market for the oil gone and no apparent interest in the meat, commercial whaling became unprofitable and the United States quit whaling in 1940, the United Kingdom in 1963. A resolution calling for a ten-year moratorium on commercial whaling was adopted at the United Nations Conference on Human Environment in 1972 and the IWC followed with an open-ended moratorium effective from 1986. Iceland withdrew from the IWC six years later and Norway resumed whaling in 1993.

Surveys show that most people believe Japan is the only country defending this age-old harvest and that only the Japanese continue to regard the meat, blubber, and other by-products as a part of daily life. While it’s true that Japan leads all other countries in its whaling activity-sending the meat into markets and onto dinner plates, as well as including it in school lunches—Japan is not alone. There are other countries that approve whaling, Iceland, Denmark and Norway among them, as well as Canada, Russia and a handful of South Pacific nations, which have refused to agree to international bans. In addition, aboriginal subsistence whaling is permitted by native peoples in Alaska, the far-eastern part of Russia, in Greenland, and in Saint Vincent and the Grenadines. What’s more, there is a strengthening international voice to cancel the commercial whaling ban altogether.

In fact, as long ago as 1972 and 1973 the Scientific Committee of the International Whaling Commission (IWC), the committee responsible for counting the world’s whales, by consensus at its meetings said that “there is no scientific justification or need for a whaling moratorium.” This opinion did not match that of the anti-whaling member nations who controlled the IWC, however, and the judgment was ignored. This same opinion was put forth by the committee once more in 1993, but again brought no change.

Then, in 1997 at the bi-annual meeting of the highly esteemed Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES), the organization generally regarded as having the last word on the subject of any creature thought to be in jeopardy, member nations stunned environmental advocates everywhere by supporting the sustainable use of abundant whale stocks, voting to allow trade in whale products fifty-seven to fifty-one. Thus, the majority endorsed the notion that whales could be killed and eaten, but since a two-thirds majority was needed to overturn a ban, the prohibition remained in place.

The operative phrase in the frustrated proposal was “abundant whale stocks.” What, after all, is “abundant”? There are nearly two million sperm whales; is that “abundant”? Certainly that number would make the defenders of any other endangered species ecstatic. Yet, the sperm whale, found in all the earth’s oceans, is still one of the eight whale species on the CITES list. (The others are not so fortunate: the blue, bowhead, finback, gray, humpback, the right, and sei have populations far smaller, many in the tens of thousands and one, the right, is estimated to be down to 3,000.)

It is important to note that Japan reportedly claims to hunt the minke whale almost exclusively, a species whose estimated numbers, while smaller than those of the sperm whale, are regarded as sufficiently large to justify limited hunting and are, therefore, not on anyone’s endangered lists. (Smaller numbers of the Pacific Brydes whale are also taken-another whale not on any threatened list.) According to the Scientific Committee of the IWC, charged with maintaining population figures, there are approximately 760,000 minke whales in the Antarctic, another 118,000 in the North Atlantic, a further 25,000 in the Okhotsk Sea and Western Pacific.

Initially, Japan objected noisily to any controls, but then it discovered it could continue limited whaling with IWC approval under the cloak of “scientific research”-where it was believed that safe management of marine resources was not then possible because knowledge of the number of whales, age composition, sex ratio, and natural mortality rate was unknown or ambiguous. The research catch by Japan was thus introduced, with the IWC limiting the capture to 2,000 whales a year, to answer such questions and eliminate uncertainties.

While it is true that the Japanese are completing their task, contributing to the world’s knowledge of the Antarctic and its cetacean population, it may be noted that they also get to keep the whales. After scientific examination and removal of necessary tissue and organ samples, the remains of the whales are frozen and marketed in compliance with further provisions of the IWC, which forbid any part of the carcass to be wasted. Voilà! Whale blubber and steak.

Environmentalists contend that Japan is hiding behind “research” to keep whaling fleets intact, and whether or not this is true, there is ample evidence that eating whale meat in that country has a long history. Discoveries at archeological digs in Japan show that whale meat has been eaten at least to the second century B.C. (Whaling began in Norway, France and Spain in the ninth century A.D.) Furthermore, after the acceptance of Buddhism in Japan, which in its early years prohibited the consumption of flesh from four-legged animals, whale meat became an important source of protein. It has been found recorded on menus from a thousand years ago and by the Muromachi Period (1333-1568) it had come to be regarded as so important as to merit inclusion on a menu contained in official literature.

Japan’s whale meat consumption was about 10,000 thousand tons in the early 1920s, jumping to 40,000 tons by 1939. Its popularity accelerated again following World War Two, when other protein sources were severely limited, reaching a high of two hundred thousand tons in 1962. Since then, the market has fallen, to just under fifteen thousand tons in 1985. Today, it appears to be less than that, although figures are not revealed because of the controversy.

The Japanese people know that the whale is a mammal, but it is commonly treated as a “fish.” (As is the dolphin or porpoise.) For instance, a quarterly journal published by the Japan Whaling Association is called Isana, a word from the ancient Japanese language composed of two Chinese characters, for “brave” and “fish,” denoting a whale. The whale to the Japanese in earlier times was, therefore, a kind of courageous fish, thus it was served at joyous occasions such as weddings and other communal celebrations.

Japan has long been, and still is, a nation of fish-eaters and the whale was regarded as just another part of the harvest from the sea; just as it has been judged by indigenous peoples from the northwestern United States, where the Maah Indian tribe won the right from the IWC to resume a 1,500-year-old whaling tradition, pointing to a treaty with the U.S. government that dated back to 1855. On the southern tip of South America, the Yahgen people used smoke signals to summon neighbors whenever a whale was caught or found beached; families would come for miles around and camp out and feast for as long as a month.

Whale Steak with Vegetables

4½ lb. whale meat

2 cup red wine

1 cup water

15 juniper berries

2 dessert spoons black currant cordial

cream

cornflour

Brown the meat on all sides in a stew pot, add the red wine, water, and mashed juniper berries. Simmer under lid for about 30 minutes. Remove the meat and wrap it in aluminum foil while finishing making the gravy.

For the gravy, add the black currant cordial to the juices in the pan. Add cream to taste and thicken with cornflour. Cut the meat into thin slices and serve with potatoes, green peas, sprouts and mountain cranberries.

High North Alliance, 1994

So-called “whale bacon” is a popular snack in Japan-thin slices that include the blubber, seen below for sale in a Kyushu fish market.

The Japanese katakana letters spell the English word, pronounced “bacon-o.”

For a tribe of native North Americans, the Kwakuitl, such a find was highly ritualized. Preparing food was women’s work and the honors, in this case, went to the daughter of the hunter who found the whale. The choicest piece was given to the village chief and others received a share, according to their status, starting with the neck and working from the top down and from head to tail.

The harvest was then loaded into the canoes and taken home, where the blubber was cut into half-inch strips and boiled in water. When the oil separated, it was ladled into watertight storage containers and the remaining strings of blubber were threaded onto long thin pieces of cedar bark and hung to dry in the rafters of the house for at least a month. It could then be taken down and reboiled as needed.

It was back in 1931 when the International Convention for Regulation of Whaling (ICRW), one of the earliest monitoring groups, set rigid standards for “aboriginal/subsistence whaling.” The concept was to aid “local, aboriginal, indigenous, or native” communities in meeting their nutritional, subsistence, and cultural requirements, but the regulations soon proved unworkable. Aborigines, who themselves were never very clearly defined, were to use only canoes or other exclusively native craft propelled by oars or sails and were forbidden to carry firearms. In effect, IRCW was saying that if an exception was going to be made for the hungry natives, they would have to stick to ancient means of pursuit and capture, a inefficient hindrance that resulted in much wasted time, effort and meat. Over time, the rules were relaxed and today, modern whaling boats usually assist in providing the limited catch.

Some of these ships are from the former Soviet Union, one of several countries-Japan is another-accused of illegal whaling. According to figures released in a report commissioned by the Australian government, one of the loudest anti-whaling voices, Soviet fleets between 1947 and 1972 killed 48,000 humpback whales, one of the most endangered species, yet reported a catch of fewer than 3,000. The Soviets also were charged with killing 8,000 pygmy blue whales, while admitting to a catch of only ten. Anti-whaling critics also said that in Japan, as recently as 1998, DNA testing of whale meat on sale in local fish markets showed some of the meat was not from Japan’s “scientific” catch, but from protected species caught thousands of miles away from the authorized hunt areas.

Whatever its legal—or ethical—status, there is no doubt about the healthy nature of whale meat. Though richer in protein, whale meat has fewer calories than beef or pork, and it is substantially lower in cholesterol. To many Arctic peoples, salted whale meat has long been an indispensable part of the diet during the winter months, as it keeps longer than salted fish and tastes good as well.

Whales are classified into two groups, baleen whales and toothed whales. Unlike toothed whales, which actively hunt their food, baleen whales “graze” on zooplankton called krill, comprised of extremely small shrimps and fish. It’s believed that this is what makes the meat so tender and juicy. The Japanese consume nearly every part of a whale, including the internal organs, the blubber, even the tail and flukes. The tastiest part is thought to be the onomi, the marbled flesh found at the base of the tail.

Surely, the controversy over killing whales will continue. Many whale species are now increasing in numbers and the political climate is changing. When CITES voted fifty-seven to fifty-one, supporting the trade of whale products in 1997, Ginette Hemley of the World Wildlife Fund told the Associated Press, “This indicates a significant decrease in opposition to whaling. The whole tone of the whaling debate has changed.”

Peter Bridgewater, chairman of the ICW, added, “The numbers [favoring an end to the ban] were much stronger than they have ever been. The interpretation being put on this by a number of countries is that the way is open for trading and people are interested.”

Greenpeace and other conservationists continue to say “No way! Feed the school children something else!”

guts

“Guts” is an interesting word. Literally, it is a reference to the alimentary canal, a tubular passage functioning in the digestion of food and extending from the mouth to the anus, a path that includes a lot of anatomy, and provides a great deal of food itself.

Sausage for the Duke of Este

“Take pigs’ throats and cut out the fat, but keep the clean, smooth glands. Slice the loins finely; also the ears (well scoured), and the snouts; peel the tongues and wash them thoroughly in hot water; bone, scrub and singe the trotters; clean the testicles. Lay the ears, snouts and trotters on the bottom of a good clean pot and cover with coarse salt. On top put the tongues, then the throats, loins and testicles sprinkled with fine salt. Let the pot stand for three days, then swill out with red wine. Soak the lot with red wine for another day. Drain, rinse several times to get rid of the salt, and dry with clean white cloths. Pack the ingredients tight into a sausage skin. Use at once or store.”

Cristoforo di Messisgbugo, chef to the Duke of Este in Parma, sixteenth century

It’s also now thought of—colloquially, at least in English—as a synonym for courage and fortitude. So, a robust and daring individual may be described as being “gutsy” or “having guts,” and to be without such character is to be “gutless.” Sometimes, this attribute is called “intestinal fortitude.” The famous World War Two army general George Patton was known as “Blood and Guts.”

In addition, many people talking about their instincts say, “I feel it in my gut.”

This is one of those rare instances when positive endorsement-using the word to mean courage and intuition—don’t do anything to make the namesake appealing as food. However many people in the world today savor the deliciously prepared parts of the alimentary canal, as many more would never even consider putting “guts” on their dinner plate. And it is interesting how many of those who will eat guts often give the meat an innocent-sounding euphemism, as if that would distance the food from its anatomical origins. Just as feet are called “trotters,” the pancreas and thymus glands are called “sweetbreads,” lungs are called “lights,” the spleen is called “melt” and testicles have a variety of more socially acceptable names, the stomach of ruminants, especially the ox, calf, or sheep, is called “tripe,” as, sometimes, are the intestines, while the intestines of young pigs are called “chitterlings.” (Or in the southern United States, “chitlins,” usually consumed with grits and collard greens.) Such foods, along with other internal organs, are called offal, meaning, literally, the “off-fall” or off-cuts from the carcass; many call these items “variety meats.” Even in Chinese households, you will never hear anyone say, “Pass the stomach” or “Could I have some more intestine, please?”