Food of the world
They say that the Virus originated from the food market in Wuhan, either by transfer from a bat or a pangolin. I doubt very much that even the Chinese eat bats, but I guess they eat almost anything else, and the virus could have been transferred from a bat to another live animal in the food market first. How that could have been a well protected pangolin, I don’t know.
Food stall along the street
Preparation of birds for consumption
Fresh poultry for sale
The little birds are for sale alive....
....or fried and ready to eat
I always was a fan of eating strange creatures for the try-out. I think I better change that. In China, we had snake, toad, dog, turtle, lizard and I don’t remember what else. Everything was tasty and we never got sick.
In the streets of Saigon 1997
Another good spot for exceptional food is China’s southern neighbor, Vietnam. One day, we met a couple of young American Vietnamese. Their parents had left the country in the exodus of 1975 and started a new life in the promised land of California. Like a lot of other exiled Vietnamese and ex GI’s the sons came back to visit their parents’ country of origin after the borders were opened in the nineties. They had motorcycles and took us on a hell’s ride of a sightseeing tour through Saigon.
Rush hour
One of the sights we had to visit was the animal market. A hall was packed with cages, which themselves were packed with creatures. The smell and the cacophony of frightened, distressed, annoyed or painful screams was dreadful. An animals’ hell. One of our new friends bought a snake, which he expected to smuggle home. I guess at that time the custom laws of importing strange stuff were not so strict, but I doubt that the snake survived the flight in the luggage compartment of the plane. They also had a strange liquor, where a snake, a chameleon and other ingredients were dissolved in alcohol. Supposedly the liquor was helpful for all kinds of ailments.
The animal market
Turtles, snakes, a little monkey and a dog for sale
A little baby crawling around in the animals' shit
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A snake and lizards in cages
The bird, a symbol of freedom
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Annoying a cobra
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One of our friends bought this snake
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The liquor described in the text, made of layers of different animals disintegrated in alcohol
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In the evening, we were taken to the night food market. We ordered pints of beer and received an English menu. On the menu were delights like cow’s penis (sic), frog or snake. That was not all. They also had a fried kind of maggot. Our friends recommended the maggots as the experience you will never forget. For the price of two dollars a piece, they indeed were unforgettable. The maggots are planted in a coconut, where they grow fat from the flesh and milk. The guy from the restaurant came, opened a nut in front of our eyes and pulled out a maggot the size of a thumb. Normally then these maggots are fried. One of our friends declared that they would taste even better alive after being soaked in beer. So with his chop sticks he dipped the writhing maggot in his beer jar. After some soaking, he raised the delicacy to his mouth and bit on it. The maggot splashed an aerosol of beer across the table. Our friend’s complexion was more one of surprise or disgust than of pleasure. The fried maggots however were a treat.
Dinner at the night market
Getting the maggots out of the coconut
The treat is ready
First bite
A lot of people look down on the eating habits in countries like China or Vietnam, or parts of Africa, where they eat the last remainders of their wildlife. I don’t know whether we have the right to point our fingers while we have wiped out most of our own wildlife already hundreds of years ago, while we keep pigs and other domestic animals by the thousands in a confined space not much bigger than their bodies and call for arms at the first sight of the reintroduction of the former widespread, now unknown like a couple of wolves or the lonesome bear. We are all from the same breed.
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Other posts about Vietnam:
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Another delicacy: pig's head
Posts about Vietnam
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