LITMIR.BIZ

      A roadside restaurant sign in the town of Kulai, near Johor Bahru in Malaysia, advertises some of the “jungle food” popular in the region.

      To assure tenderness, Carnivore chefs also marinate the meat for eight to twenty-four hours in a mixture of oil, water, soy sauce, lemon, tarragon, red wine, salt, white pepper, and cardamom seeds, and during cooking, baste it with a barbecue sauce made of honey, lime juice, oil, soy sauce, and cornstarch.

      Almost all game animals lend themselves agreeably to stews and stroganoffs, or may be cooked on a grill, roasted in an oven, or baked. In South Africa, bush pig and several members of the gazelle family are routinely turned into biltong, or jerky, an age-old way of preserving meat for another day.

      Elephant Stew

       1 elephant

       Brown gravy

       Salt and pepper to taste

       2 rabbits (optional)

      First, find your elephant. Cut elephant into bitesized pieces. Be sure to allow adequate time. In a large pot, cover pieces with brown gravy and simmer. Cook over an open fire for four weeks at 465°F. This will serve about 3,800 people. If more guests are expected, 2 rabbits may be added, but do this only if necessary as most people dislike finding a hare in their stew.

      Elephant conservationists may not think this is funny, because both species of elephant—the Asian and the African—are listed by every environmental group worldwide as endangered species. Where once large numbers of elephants roamed Africa from the Sahara to the Cape of Good Hope and occupied Asian forests nearly everywhere, now the numbers are small and the prospects are grim. Poachers continue to kill them for their ivory, a trade that is blamed for the slaughter of seven hundred thousand elephants in the decade before it was banned in 1989. Deforestation has removed much of their natural habitat, especially in Asia. Except for small numbers required in the tourism trade, few are needed now for transportation. At the same time, logging restrictions in many countries have taken away other traditional work.

      That said, the African elephant is still being killed for food. Legally. And it is possible, if you visit one of the countries where elephant finds it way to a restaurant menu, to enjoy elephant stew—without hare—as well as elephant trunk steak, which is believed to be the tastiest part. You may even be able to find elephant meat in a tin to take home as a souvenir, to impress or offend your friends.

      Elephant meat has been eaten for tens of thousands of years, going back to when primitive man hunted the modern pachyderm’s ancestors, the mammoths and mastodons, with spears, or by driving them off cliffs with fire. Even in recent times, many African peoples included the animal in their diet. The Pygmies of Africa were known for their prowess in bringing down the giants with poisoned arrows.

      Such activity did not affect the population; those killed numbered fewer than those born. The harvest was sustainable.

      Today in most African and all Asian countries, the elephant population is threatened. Most, but not all. In Zimbabwe, protection efforts were so successful that the government initiated a program to cull the elephant population. In 1995, George Pangeti, deputy director of the Department of National Parks and Wildlife, said there were between seventy and eighty thousand elephants in an environment that could support only half that number. An adult elephant ate up to four hundred and fifty pounds of vegetation a day, he said, and large areas of the national parks were being ravaged by overpopulation, upsetting the ecological balance needed to sustain other wildlife.

      The same argument was voiced in South Africa, where in Kruger National Park—a game reserve the size of Israel— the elephant population grew to eight thousand from the few hundred the ivory hunters left in the early 1990s. With park officials warning that the reserve could provide for only seven thousand and that larger numbers would endanger other species, pushing them to the brink of extinction, or at least to hunger. The government proposed a culling program that included selling the hides (for expensive luggage and so on) and the meat, which in turn would bring up to US$500,000 a year, to be assigned to conservation programs.

      Animal welfare groups in Europe and the U.S. argued that the culling would weaken the ivory trade ban as well as encourage more poaching by creating new markets for the meat and skins. Why not send the unwanted beasts elsewhere? South Africa did that, relocating hundreds to smaller reserves, as did Kenya, moving elephants from crowded areas to parks where the herds had been decimated. But the overpopulation problem remained in some areas and it was prohibitively expensive to transport the animals over longer distances, say, from one country to another.

      With politicians nervous about endorsing any law that sanctioned the killing of elephants, the beasts were put up for sale and “adoption.” Understandably, there were few takers and finally the herds were thinned by government hunters in helicopters using drugged darts, at last sending the meat and hides to the marketplace.

      Such government programs were not cheap. Skinning an elephant required a team of people several hours and five hundred pounds of salt to treat a single animal, while hauling a thousand or more pounds of meat a long distance was no easy matter. In fact, the scale of the economics brought one effort at culling to its knees in 1965. This was funded by the United Nations, creating an abattoir in Zambia that was designed to cut five per cent of the local populations of elephant, hippopotamus, and buffalo. By 1970, the program was scrapped, due largely to the cost of transporting the carcasses over long distances and poor marketing. Today in South Africa, most elephant meat feeds the poor living in densely populated areas surrounding the game reserves.

      Historically, elephant meat usually has been consumed on the spot, or smoked and dried for later use. The trunks and feet are considered the choicest cuts; elephant fat has been made into cooking oil.

      Even after twelve or more hours of cooking (or long aging in the open air), the meat is regarded as somewhat chewy. The flesh, which is muscular and gelatinous, compares with beef tongue, which it also resembles in taste, only gamier.

      If you wish to try this delicacy in Africa, book a flight soon. In Johannesburg, politicians are talking about putting the elephants on birth-control pills.

      A waiter at the Carnivore restaurant in Nairobi serves up the bush meat du jour, carved right at the diners’ table.

      Kangaroo has found recent favor in modern cuisine. In London’s Sugar Club, renowned chef Peter Gordon, a New Zealander, serves a Thai-style spicy kangaroo salad, and likes the meat for its taste and tenderness.

      A chimp, such as this one, occasionally may serve as a family pet, but only for a short time, and then it’s into the pot or is sold at a central African market.

      Monkeys are smoked over open wood tires in the wild, then packaged for shipping to the city or put aside for later consumption. In the Congo Republic in 1997, the prime minister officially announced that all school children should spend their holidays hunting and fishing, an announcement made during the closed season.

      Gorilla

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