travelling and eating

by m. werneburg, 2008.03.18

While travelling, I have eaten some interesting things. These are my experiences.

Eating things without asking what they are can be an entertaining experience. Usually, I find myself doing this when I don't share any languages with the party supplying the food. In this manner, I've had some delightful surprises, such as:

kava, in Fiji (you have to drink it all down in one go, if you want it to count with the locals)

Tibettan sticky-rice hand rolls with what I think was rhubarb or maybe some kind of bean

An excellent Indian snack made of mung beans, onion, and some spices (I teased Sara that it was beans and Myna bird, heh heh)

eaten things without asking if my guide was kidding. This, too, has led to some nice surprises, such as:

Once I reached into the North Pacific, pulled out a handful of kelp, and ate it (yummy!). My guide had assured me that it was both edible and nutritious. After I ate it, she hesitantly added that it was full of bugs and critters.

Beef tongue in several forms, ranging from Jewish smoked (mmmmm) to Korean grilled (mmmmm) to Japanese sausages (mmmmm).

A Philipino dish which I think was called Bulot. It was a fertilized egg, complete with a fairly well defined embryo (it even had nascant feathers!). I'll give you one guess what that tasted like...

Steak Tartare (raw ground beef with shallots, mmmm)

Bowls full of what looked, tasted and had the temperature of old phlegm (this is a rare side dish in Japan; I still don't know what it is, but having tried it I always pass it up).

I've had local dishes wherever I've been, and these days cosmopolitan cities can dredge up just about anything anyway. I've found only one nation on Earth which eats inedible food (England), and found delightful local dishes which I can recommend. By country, they are:

Ireland

Cabbage &Bacon: A surprisingly delicious meal. The Irish excel at creating delightful dishes out of simple fare. Another case in point:

Stew: either with Guiness or without.

Irish Breakfasts are the best on Earth

Germany

Huge breakfasts: German foods tend to be heart-stoppingly rich, but the German breakfast of sliced meats, high-yield spreads, Brötchen (literally, small breads), thick cream for your strong coffee are fantastic.

Though I can no longer eat cake (lousy food allergies), German tortes are supreme. The Germans eat rich cakes in the afternoon at Coffee time with strong coffee.

Denmark

Sea food. Anything from the North Sea seems to be great.

Australia

Kangaroo: It's gamey, like venison, but with a texture more like lamb. Good stuff!

Barramundi: Fresh Barramundi, as served in N. Queensland, for instance, is among the best seafood I've ever encountered. Big flakes, great taste!

Fiji

Fresh tropical fruit and vegetables: One morning I was on a hike in Fiji, and one of my fellow travellers, spotted six or seven sources of nutrition an arm's length from the path.

Indian dishes: The Indo-Fijians make awesome stuff.

Japan

Oh, where do I even start. Forget California rolls and gyoza (though there are gyoza trucks prowling some of the shopping districts). Izakayas. Yakatoris. Katzu. Okonomiyake. Fish-on-a-stick. Raw horse meat sizzling on a hot stone. Soba. Yakiniku (okay, that's a Korean import). Did I mention the Izakayas? Regional restaurants. Steak places that blow the doors off of anything in North America. Places to get burgers with leafs of lettuce or rice patties in place of a bun. Even the 7-11's have warm foods in rich broths at 03:00. Then there are the whale and horse sashimi offerings (no sizzling stone, just raw meat), the bee larvae, eels testes, sheep's brains, shrimp ice cream, tooth-paste flavoured garnishes....

shark fin soup

It may strike some readers as hypocrasy on my part (given that I've tried whale meat), but find the eating of shark fin soup ethically and ecologically questionable. I urge everyone not to east the stuff.

The problem with shark fin soup is the savagery and waste. It's harvested through a brutal process as follows:

scour the seas for sharks
catch anything you can find, and hack the fins from it
dump the still-living thing back into the ocean to die

We humans engage in plenty of brutal activities when it comes to feeding ourselves. It's part of the whole carnivore act, I suppose. But dumping mutilated animals without their limbs has to be near the worst of it.

Aside from the brutality is the waste. Why not harvest the rest of the fish? It's every bit as edible as the fins. Is it just a matter of fashion that drives us to do this? This waste is causing us to obliterate the world's sharks. Some 90% of the shark population of the world is now gone, and we've driven several species to the point of extinction.

And here there's a real problem. For the sharks are among the keystone species of the oceans, responsible in a way for maintaining a certain stability in the populations of prey species. Without us butchering the sharks for a small fraction of their meat, the sharks would continue with their natural role. Without the sharks, the gods only know what's going on in the oceans.

We depend on the oceans' biota for food, pharmaceuticals, cosmetics, vitamins, manufacturing industries and countless fields of scientific research. Why fuck all that up because we want to follow fashion?

A classic example is the carrier pigeon. They once flew in such numbers that a flock on the wing could span the entire sky. Then they became a fashionable delicacy, and we started to hunt them en masse. I've read that we'd cull them in such numbers that we needed trucks and train cars!

Of course, we wiped out the carrier pigeon in no time. And what great impact did that have on the environment? We'll never know; we weren't measuring such things in those days. But the role of the shark species is clear, and we can't afford to repeat our gluttonous genocide.