To know a people, know their food. In a foreign land, we always try to make it to a local grocery or market, just to see what's different there. When you're on holiday, one of the great pleasures is to sample the local cuisine.
The little deep-fried scorpions on our first trip to Beijing were cute and crunchy. Finnish moose is hearty, warming and delicious. The crocodile tail in Cape Town was leathery and tough and caused intestinal revolt later on, but hey, when in South Africa....
We went for the betel nut high on the banks of the Sepik River in Papua New Guinea:
They offered a chew of
betel nut. An amused audience watched us split ‘em open and pop the nuts into
our mouths. You chew; that generates saliva, and you spit the juice through
your teeth while keeping the meat. It was a technique I didn’t master.
The juice is white. You
dip a couple-inch piece of mustard stalk into “lime,” pounded from mussel
shell, and chomp it. It turns the juice bright red. Chew, spit, chew. It’s a
little bitter and it gets your heart moving a bit, a little blood rushes to
your head, everything’s a notch more intense, and then it fades.
The larvae-in-a-branch in Kyuak Tan village, Burma, was a bug too far, though:
You could buy branches
too, inside of which some God-forsaken larvae nestled. Yep, you bought the
branch, plucked the thing out and popped it in your mouth. Tasted like butter,
Kyaw said, except crunchy. This was more of a Chinese practice than a Burmese
one, he assured us, and he'd only tried it once. My God, these people were
eating worms out of trees!!!
With this for comparison, let us not lament the closing of the three McDonald's in Iceland. You can manage until you get back home. For those who must, I was going to suggest the Hard Rock Cafe Reykjavik, but whoops, looks like that's gone, too. In the spirit of the region, enjoy some fine imported smoked Scandinavian reindeer instead.
(Photo: Making sago paste in Papua New Guinea. Visit the Food Gallery at EarthPhotos.com.)
