I had no idea what I was doing there. I enjoy immersing myself in local culture but I should have known my limits. I had allowed the host of my guest house to direct me to a restaurant serving one of the local specialities: man�s best friend. As the waitress demanded my order I couldn�t stop myself from pointing at the shopfront display of dishes and asking her �How much is that doggie in the window?�
It turned out to be surprisingly expensive but it would have been overpriced if they�d been giving it away. The meat was the darkest I�ve ever seen. A piquant sauce gave it a respectibility it hardly deserved. And it was very chewy, which was unfortunate because every mouthful just gave me longer to think about what it was I was eating. I say �every mouthful� but I confess I couldn�t manage more than one, and even that one struggled to stay down. Meanwhile, my Swiss companions chewed away. �I wouldn�t order it again�, they said, �but it�s not bad�.
But dog was only one of the Manado region�s exotic offerings. A restaurant on a hillside near town offered a wider range. The menu was an animal lover�s nightmare. Dog was old hat by now so we thought we�d try the bat. Bat turned out to be very expensive so we settled for rat. The pricing, we reasoned, was based on the level of difficulty involved in catching the dishes. Bats only come out at night and they fly high and fast; rats, on the other hand, appeared to be living in the kitchen. One was soon caught and minutes later it was served up to me: all skin and bones and another dark spicy sauce to conceal the taste.
I couldn�t eat it and called the waitress over to order some snake, which I thought I could manage. The waitress gave me a look that suggested this was the local equivalent of ordering an omelette in a curry house. The old story is a myth: snake does not taste like chicken. It�s much slimier and more fiddly. If you want chicken, you had better order it.
Many people stumble across these unusual foods by mistake, especially where they have no ability in the local language. The common story is pointing at a dish on a neighbouring table and saying something along the lines of �I�ll have the same as him�. Which reminds me of the story of an animal lover�s visit to the famous animal market in Canton, China. The street is like a pet shop, except that the Chinese aren�t big on pets and people shop there for food. The local urban myth among travellers goes like this. A cat-loving tourist is dismayed to see a poor feline incarcerated in a small cage, destined for a Cantonese cooking pot. The traveller decides to buy the cat and liberate it. With only limited Chinese he manages to negotiate a price and secure the purchase. The stall-holder, pleased with the deal, pulls the cat from the cage, snaps its neck and puts it in a bag for the distressed tourist.
If there is any conclusion to be drawn, it is that other countries have different attitudes towards animals than we do. I have some sympathies with this. Why, so the question goes, should you not eat dog meat if you eat beef? And after some traumatic research I have the answer. The reason why we don�t eat animals like dogs and rats is not because they�re cute or filthy. It�s all a question of taste. I may not know much about food but I do know what I don't like.
Copyright Nicholas White 2000