I Would Not, Could Not Eat a Cat...

I would not, could not eat a bat
I will not have it on my plate
No, please don't tell me what I ate.

That’s right friends, we have another tale of culinary cultural crossover! Some of you will recall hearing about the sad fate of my friend B during training. For the rest, I will summarize. One afternoon, as we were all heading off to a training session in the neighboring city, B’s host mother approached him and told him that she was going to prepare something special for dinner. His host father handed him a plastic bag and instructed him to open it. Inside was, of course, a dead cat. Nothing says “dinner party” like fried yams and cat brains. B was a really good sport about the whole thing and managed to eat two different feline themed meals before throwing in the towel, and the rest of us were treated to regular text message updates.

Now, I must confess here that I mocked B quite a lot about the incident, in part because such a happening was one of my biggest fears for life with my host family. Most of you know that I am a not-so-strict vegetarian, and I explained this to my host family upon arrival. It took a lot of explaining (and a compromise on chicken bouillon cubes, which were a deal breaker for my host mom), but in the end, no meat of any kind ever found its way onto my plate. Refusing food here can be even more insulting than declining my grandmother’s ham and cheese ball at Christmas, and the last thing anyone wants on their hands is a host mother with injured pride. I considered myself very fortunate to have such an understanding one, and counted myself lucky to be mostly out of the woods once I made it through stage to my own house here at post, where I could cook and eat as I pleased.

Of course, that’s about when karma kicked in to chastise me for my erstwhile schadenfreude. Though I am mostly free to cook and eat what I like (within the limited options available at my local market), I have made a few friends here who occasionally invite me to dinner at their homes. On these visits, I have explained my preference not to eat meat but have nonetheless, for the sake of politeness, consumed in one form or another chicken, beef, guinea fowl, and on one occasion, goat. This doesn’t particularly thrill me, but I am making slow progress at explaining my dietary preferences, and I have been known to make these kinds of exceptions in the States as well, hence my not-so-strict vegetarian status. When I was living at Dismas House, I partook of more than one donated turkey noodle casserole and a certain world famous peanut butter chicken gumbo.

None of that had adequately prepared me for what happened about a week ago. The chief had invited me to dine at his house with the promise of beans and rice with a tomato sauce, one of my favorites, but on this auspicious occasion, he stopped me in the market around lunchtime and told me that he’d found something extra special for dinner that evening, something which he thought I had never tasted before. He was right because when I got to his house, he showed me a pot full of roasting bats. The bats were whole and had been roasted over a fire on a spit before stewing in a pot of spicy sauce. We were to eat them with fufu. Now, I am trying very hard here to be open to new cultural experiences, but I could feel every reflex in my body recoil at the site of a large bat with teeth grimacing up at me from my plate. On the other hand, he is the chief, and I didn’t really have a choice. Thankfully, I was not expected to eat the entire thing myself. As it turns out, bat is something of a delicacy, so, like a nice merlot or a large slice of chocolate cake, we would share one for the table. My host graciously offered me the head, but I was able to get by with tasting just a bite of rib meat. To answer the most obvious question, it wasn’t all that bad. It did, in fact, taste a lot like chicken. I console myself now with the thought that at least I can be sure the bat was free range and organic.