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
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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