lundi 16 avril 2012

Tasty elephant

Sean, Pragues stepchild wrote an interesting essay about a new research result that supports the Expensive Tissue Hypotheses. I have not much to contribute to it except that picture below.
Yes that's elephant trunc stew in njemboué sauce (oil palm sauce).


I tried that dish in 2003 when I visited Gabon in equatorial Africa. I can not say that it was something that I would retry anytime soon. The taste was not so bad, but the texture was quite unpleasant, chewy like oversized tripe or squid rings.
Another interesting point, as one can see on the picture, Africans are not yet infected by the fat-phobia we see in the western world. The Niemboué is exactly as it looks like, mainly red palm oil.
While we're at the subject of "meat-eating" in the third-world.
A smoked monkey, a pangolin and a fresh monkey. These kind of stands can be found all along the roads going from Libreville to the other towns of Gabon. That one was 20km from Lambaréné, the famous town where Albert Schweitzer had his hospital. Gary Taubes dedicated a chapter of Good Calories, Bad Calories to him.