Strange Foods. Jerry Hopkins

Чтение книги онлайн.

      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.