Strange Foods - Jerry Hopkins

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waste and with the introduction of fences erected by sheep herders and other homesteaders, the surviving animals’ freedom to range was restricted, their natural lifestyle inhibited. By the end of the century, the American buffalo was driven to the point of extinction; unbelievably, from tens of millions, only about a thousand still grazed the plains.

      Happily, the tide has turned. Small wild herds survived in parts of the U.S. (notably in what became Yellowstone Park) and Canada and in the twentieth century, efforts were introduced to protect the animal and reconstitute the once-great herds. Today, the buffalo’s future seems secure as more than a hundred thousand of them range parklands and private ranches from New York to California, from Canada to Oklahoma. Some of the herds, including the largest in existence-numbering twelve thousand—are on ranches owned by American media mogul Ted Turner and his wife, actress Jane Fonda, and the corporate emblem of the company that administers their ranches is a charging bison.

      Many of today’s herds, including Mr. Turner’s, are being managed at least partly for the production of food, so today it is becoming more common to see charbroiled bison steak and stew on menus in the U.S. and Canada. Because of its resemblance to beef, in appearance as well as in taste, it has found ready acceptance wherever it is available; limited quantity and distribution, however, has kept the meat unknown in most places. The bison also is being cross-bred with cattle, producing what is called “beefalo,” and sometimes “cattelo.” (However, the male of the mixed breed so far is infertile.) The North American Bison Cooperative, backed by scientific studies, boasts that the meat is lower in cholesterol and saturated fat than beef, non-allergenic, and free of chemicals.

      Bud Flocchini of Gillette, Wyoming, president of the American Bison Association, says the membership has doubled to twenty-three hundred since 1993. “We’ve never seen such interest,” he says. “Heifer calves are selling now for about US$1,600 each, and two-year-olds for up to $3,500. Last year, a champion blue-ribbon bull sold for $15,000. But most buyers are small operators. We advise them to study the animal very carefully before getting started, and pay a lot of attention to fences. These animals are much tougher to work with than beef cattle. To produce income, you need between fifty to one hundred head and around fifty acres of good pasture, with supplementary feed in the off-season.”

      Much of the bison consumed by the Indian nations was in the form of pemmican, a word that comes from the Cree, meaning “journey meat.” To make pemmican, or jerky, the Cree dried strips of buffalo meat in the sun, a process that took a few days. They then pounded it into a pulp, mixing it with the fat from a bear or goose, or the bison itself, and, if available, pulverized dry fruit. More colorful was the description by C. Levi Strauss in The Origin of Table Manners (1978): “They placed thin slices of hard meat carefully on a bed of charcoal, first on one side then on the other. They beat them to break them into small pieces, which they mixed with melted bison fat and marrow. Then they pressed it into leather bags, taking care that no air was left inside. When the bags were sewn up, the women flattened them by jumping on them to blend the ingredients. They put them to dry in the sun.”

      The bison has numerous cousins around the world, many of them also cherished as a renewable, non-threatened protein source. These include the Cape buffalo in Africa, and in Asia, the water buffalo and yak.

      Of these, surely the water buffalo is the most commonly consumed. With an estimated 140 million in existence, this largely domesticated, cud-chewing, plant-eating animal is now spread over much of the world, but it is in Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia, the Philippines, Myanmar, China, Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam where the majority live. Here, they labor as the developing world’s tractor, while serving as family friend, object of competitive sport (battling head-to-head during festivals or in long, bouncy dashes in a race against the clock, riders clinging precariously to their asphalt hides), and household symbol of status, wealth, and tranquility. Sacrifice a buffalo at a funeral or in a religious rite or offer one as part of a dowry for a bride and your local status goes up, or put them to work in the paddy fields and, between shifts in front of primitive plows, let them and children mind each other in muddy peace. Surely no other Asian beast of burden is so revered.

      The water buffalo plays an important role in the cultures of rice-growing Asia, here celebrated in the Philippines at the annual carabao (Tagalog for “buffalo”) festival in Pulilan, north of Manila. Farmers parade their animals dressed and decorated for the occasion.

      Given this status in Asian society, it may seem surprising that the water buffalo so easily becomes dinner. In fact, until most Southeast Asian countries first imported real beef from Australia and elsewhere about twenty years ago, most of the “beef’ consumed in Asia was water buffalo—sadly much of it rather chewy, due to the animals’ advanced age; after all, there was no advantage in butchering a key member of the family work force.

      Related distantly to domestic cattle, the water buffalo—so called because they like to wallow in mud and water-labored in fields in Iraq and the Indus Valley as long as four thousand years ago, and domesticated populations existed in southern China a thousand years later. Wide hooves, flexible joints, and tremendous strength allow them to pull a plow knee-deep in mud. They also have a docile nature and thrive on low-quality forage, surviving happily on wild grass and the stubble left behind following a rice harvest. Despite such a humble diet, adults often reach nine feet in length, can be nearly six feet high at the shoulders, and weigh more than a ton, as much as a small automobile.

      Today, water buffalo are a major source of milk, contributing about half of the milk consumed in India. This liquid, which has much more fat, more nonfat solids, and less water than cow’s milk, also is important in China and the Philippines. In India, the milk is also used for making a kind of liquid butter, and herds created for commercial purposes, as far apart as Italy and Australia, provide the milk that is turned into mozzarella cheese. Similarly, the Cape buffalo contributes much milk to the diet in Africa. Still, mainly the beast is valued for its flesh.

      In 1993, for example, when the United Nations was in Cambodia helping organize and supervise the country’s first election, one of the UN vehicles slammed into a water buffalo as it ambled across a rural road. The driver panicked and hurried back to the capital, Phnom Penh, where he was told by his superiors that he must return to the scene of the accident and pay the villagers for their loss. When he arrived next day, the buffalo already had been butchered and partially consumed. The representative was invited to stay for supper.

      Water buffalo may be consumed raw (usually ground, as in steak tartare), dried, or cooked as beef would be prepared. Some of the earliest written recipes survive from the nineteenth century, when, in Laos, the king’s chef included instructions for making “hot boiled water buffalo sauce” to be served with slices of raw eggplant or cucumber, “slow-cooked water buffalo tripe,” and the meat in a kind of stew seasoned with lemon grass and chili peppers. Even today in Laos, there is a restaurant in the capital, Vientiane, known for its buffalo specialties, including placenta, fetus, udder, and brains. As is true for other animals, the older the beast, the tougher the meat, so tenderizers may be warranted.

      Today, the water buffalo population is shrinking, worldwide. The average population growth rate in Asia has, over the past three decades, declined by more than half. As farmers replaced these four-legged tractors with three-wheeled ones (the earliest were called “iron buffalo”), interest in breeding dropped. At the same time, more and more farmers sought work in the cities, leaving much of the rice farming to large conglomerates. In the past, four hundred families in one village might have owned as many as a thousand buffaloes. Nowadays, the same number may have only twenty-five.

      In the high plateaus and mountains of Central Asia, in eastern Kashmir, Nepal, and Tibet, ranging from the lower valleys to twenty-thousand-foot elevations where the climate is cold and dry, there lives another cousin of the bison and water buffalo, the yak. Known for an unusually luxuriant coat almost reaching to the ground and its long, curving horns, it looks like a large brown or reddish shag rug thrown over a longhorn steer with a hump. Despite their relative immensity-yaks also weigh as much as a small car-they are nimble climbers and sure swimmers, roaming icy mountainsides and valleys, grazing on native grass.

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