As I have written before, one of the keys to enjoying myself on trips, especially in the food department, is to go with what the locals suggest. This nearly always works out extremely well, with the food being much more interesting, and on average (because local and thus fresh products are involved), tastier than what I get when traveling in the U.S. Also, the food that is ingested outside the borders of the States would rarely seem strange to anyone from the U.S. with even a minimal amount of imagination. There have, however, been some notable exceptions to this rule.
“Are you certain you want to know?” This was the response Frances and I received when we asked someone at a banquet held in a hut/restaurant in rural China what a particularly tasty dish was that came wrapped in a banana leaf. The consistency was soft without being mushy and the flavor a wonderful mixture of herbs with a solid spicy after-burn. “Yes, we really would like to know”, was our answer, followed quickly by his reply – "pig’s brains." So much for my resolve to never eat the nervous system of any animal, thereby eliminating the possibility of prion infection that would eventually lead to some variant of ‘mad-cow disease’.
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“Oh man, we are feeding off an endangered species!” This was said as we continued to ravenously devour the curried meat dish handed to us by the villager who had been so kind to notice that we looked like we were starving to death. We had been in the tropical forest area, less than a degree of latitude from the equator, in the South American country of Suriname for nearly a week. We had been living off of cheap freeze dried food and rice, as we sweated and swore through long days and nights trapping mammals for the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The revelation that we were contributing somewhat to the demise of a rare life form came when we asked Leo our guide to enquire with the bearer of this wonderful gift what the meat was. She answered in the local dialect – that none of us understood – and then Leo turned to us and said “It’s armadillo.” We knew enough of the local fauna to realize that the only form of armadillo in this region was very rare, and therefore listed as endangered, apparently at least partially because of hungry scientists.
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“I wonder if you would like to try a local delicacy?” Wen said this with what seemed to me to be a bit of a sly smile, but then all us round-eyes know that all Chinese are inscrutable so who can tell? Our answer, of “Why not?” was met with a torrent of Mandarin between Wen and the waiter. As an after thought we asked what the delicacy was – “Insects” was his answer. O.K. inscrutable or not, maybe we should have enquired before the ordering began. When asked what kind of insects (like we were going to be able to compare these insects to the insects we usually had at home) we were told that they would be fried bamboo larvae and wasp pupae. Great, at least we would have a choice. The amazing thing, Frances and I loved these fried morsels, though I was more partial to the larvae and Frances to the pupae. Go figure, men and women differ in their preferred bug cuisines.
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The final (at least for now) adventure in culinary oddities occurred in far western Papua New Guinea, only 30 kms (about 20 miles) from Irian Jaya. Once again, it involved famished scientists and a gracious villager with food. But, unlike the armadillo incident, this was one of the worst food-related episodes of my life. As we walked into the remote village, marked by houses on stilts and naked children, we were greeted by a host of smiling faces and the offer, communicated through our local guide, to sit down in the shade of a tree. We had been walking for hours so we gratefully collapsed on the ground, pulled out our water bottles and gulped the lukewarm liquid. As we did this we noticed a set of women ladling some off-white substance into plates. They approached us, bowed slightly and handed us the dish. We asked our guide what we were holding and he said ‘boiled yams.’ Our first bite revealed the serious situation in which we found ourselves. The yams had the consistency and flavor of wood glue (the flavor by the way recalled from childhood experiments). I swallowed the mouthful whole, and it slowly slid down my gullet and landed in my stomach like a bag of nickels. Evidently my body and brain were convinced that they were being poisoned because on the way down the mass caused my gag-reflex to kick in. I glanced at my companion and saw by the grimace on his face that he was suffering from the same bodily reaction. I grabbed my water bottle and took another gulp. Looking up, I smiled wanly at the ladies hovering around us, and performed what I consider to be one of the bravest acts ever accomplished by humankind, I took another large spoonful and shoved it in my mouth. This time I did not wait for my reflexes to try and reject the mush, and immediately took another slug of water. Miraculously the water in my bottle held out until the plate was clean. With grey faces, sweating foreheads and painfully distended stomachs, we limped out of the village hoping to make it out of sight before we were violently ill.
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