Strange Foods. Jerry Hopkins
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 <[email protected]>.
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.
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