Strange Foods. Jerry Hopkins

      

      Published by Periplus Editions (HK) Ltd. Text copyright© 1999 Haku ‘Olelo Inc Photos copyright® 1999 Michael Freeman All rights reserved—No part of this book may be reproduced without written permission from the publisher.

      ISBN 962-593-154-6

      Hopkins, Jerry.

       Strange foods: bush meats, bats and butterflies

       by Jerry Hopkins: with photographs by Michael Freeman. — 1st. ed.

       p. cm.

       ISBN 9625931546 (pb)

       ISBN 978-1-4629-1676-4 (ebook)

       1. Gastronomy. 2. Cookery. 1. Title.

       TX631.H56 1999

       641’ .01’3--dc21 98-56158

       CIP

      Publisher: Eric Oey

       Associate Publisher: Christina Ong

       Designer: William Atyeo

      Distributed by:

       USA: Tuttle Publishing, 364 Innovation Drive, North Clarendon, VT 05759 U.S.A.

      Japan: Tuttle Publishing, Yaekari Building 3rd Floor, 5-4-12 Osaki Shinagawa-ku, Tokyo 141-0032

      Asia Pacific: Berkeley Books Pte. Ltd., 61 Tai Seng Avenue, #02-12 Singapore 534167

       [email protected] www.tuttlepublishing.com

      Endpaper front: The preparation of cassava bread from poisonous manioc in a Wapisana village in the interior of today’s Guyana is shown in this 1840 print. Two women grate the tubers to a pulp, which will then be squeezed in the long woven tube hanging behind them. The resulting paste, in the tray in the foreground, is then formed into flat, thin cakes, which another woman cooks on a large hotplate. The finished bread is stored on the roof thatch.

       Endpaper back: Cricket Lick—it lollipops: candy with a crunchy center.

       Endpaper verso: The agave “worm” at the end of a bottle of Mexican mezcal is in fact a moth pupa.

       Title page: Tibetan pilgrims halt on the arduous circuit around Mount Kailash -Asia’s most sacred mountain - to eat yak meat and brew yak butter tea.

      Photographer’s Note

      My secret training began as a child, at an English boarding school. 1 realise that few readers will truly appreciate the significance of this, but survival depended heavily on being able to eat, for weeks at a time, a food regime that was modelled loosely on that of Victorian prisons. A cartoonist called Ronald Searle once produced a book about these very English institutions, and to my mind no-one has bettered his description of school dinner as “the piece of cod which passeth all understanding.” There can no finer education of the palate to accept the impossible than the one I and my fellow inmates received, and for that I am, as was intoned before each meal, “truly grateful.”

      As a photographer, I put my catholic tastes to work and began, many years ago, shooting the weird culinary habits that I came across. Much of this was in Asia, not only because the region became something of a speciality of mine, but because the southern Chinese and their neighbours, particularly in Thailand, Laos and Vietnam, have a greater fascination with unusual foods than any other culture I know. So where more appropriate should I meet Jerry for the first time than in Bangkok, where we found that we shared many of the same tastes.

      With very few exceptions, I ate what you see photographed here. Keeping or consuming the props, I should explain, is considered one of the perks of photography, and where a fashion photographer might get the clothes at the end of the shoot (or the model if lucky), I would be left with the gooey parts. Yes, that includes the rats and the bats and the buffalo’s penis-two-and-a-half feet, by the way, when flaccid. My only regret is that the publisher excised some of the best bits on the grounds of common decency. Surely you wouldn’t have been offended by the breakfast of raw chopped dog, flavoured with its bile? On second thought, perhaps you would.

      One of the oldest Eskimo groups, the Ostiaks, are pictured here eating raw reindeer meat off the bone, a delicacy not usually enjoyed by these people.

      contents

       one man’s meat...another’s poison

       mammals

       dogs Et cats

       horse

       rat Et mouse

       bats

       primates Et other bush meat

       bison, water buffalo, Et yak

       whale

       guts

       ears, eyes, noses, lungs, tongues, lips, gums, glands, Et feet

       genitilia

       urine

       human flesh

       reptiles & water creatures

       snake

       lizards

       alligator Et crocodile

       frog Et toad

       shark

       fugu

       jellyfish

       snails Et slugs

       worms

       fish eggs

       birds

       ostrich Et emu

       song birds, pigeons, Et doves

       birds’ nest

       balut

       insects, spiders, & scorpions

       grasshoppers

       ants Et termites

       spiders Et scorpions

       beetles

       crickets Et cicadas

       butterflies Et moths

       flies

       plants

       poisonous plants

       flowers

       cactus

       durian

       leftovers

       blood

       live Et almost live