Strange Foods. Jerry Hopkins

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      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.

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