(RM) Monkey lunch

Monkey lunch

Monday, 16 April, 2007


Let me begin by saying that I've been a vegetarian for the past ten years. I turned veggie around January or February 1997, sometime into my second semester of my degree program in Geography and Environmental Science. I think most of the students in the program became vegetarian by around then, as well. The rationale was basically that the meat industry, in its current form in the developed world, has such a detrimental effect on the environment, that, if we were purporting to be somewhat environmentally conscious, the least we could do as individuals would be to stop supporting that force of environmental degradation.

To be fair, I was never very much of a meat eater up to that point, so the switch from omnivore to herbivore was not very difficult for me. I never gave up eggs or milk products, so the proper title of my vegetarianism has been ovo-lacto-vegetarian. I never liked fish in the first place, so I didn't eat them either. When possible, I usually bought free-range eggs, too.

In the intervening decade, my sister will claim that I was not really vegetarian, because I did occasionally make exceptions and eat meat. This is true, although I still pretty much stood by my original rationale for not eating meat: I would generally be ok with eating it if it were not produced in an environmentally detrimental way. If someone caught a fish on the lake at the cottage, for example, I'd be happy to have some.

The other exception I would make was for culturally-mandated meat. Yeah, you could argue that eating tons of beef in the United States is culturally-mandated, but that's taking a rather narrow view of American culture, don't you think? What I'm referring to is basically turkey on Thanksgiving, sushi at Japanese restaurants, and goat in Africa. The goat in Africa is ok because that's how the people I had been among there produced their own food. The turkey on Thanksgiving I only had a couple of times, because yes, it is indeed a very cultural thing to have a turkey on Thanksgiving. And the sushi... well, I admit that's a bit of a stretch, but what else would I eat at those restaurants!?

Ok enough about all that, now back to the Congo. When I left the States a couple of months ago, I determined that I would indeed be giving up my vegetarianism because once I got here, I would have so little choice in what I'd be eating that I couldn't really afford to forgo certain things based on my stance while in North America. And anyway, we would only really be eating meat that was harvested sustainably, as opposed to being raised in massive meat factories like in North America. I had my first couple of non-vegetarian meals while in France, and I've had a lot of fish since arriving in Congo.

The fish is an everyday staple here at camp. We have a resident fisherman (on rotations) that is housed, fed, and doled out a daily cigarette, and we pay him by the kilogram of fish he brings in every day. This usually amounts to a chunk or two per person, per meal, including our workers. We also have a supply of locally-produced smoked fish that supplements days where the fisherman only brings in a kilo or two.

The fish is caught in the Lokoro River, which is very close to our camp, and which has innumerable tributary branches that flood into the forest closer to camp. The fishermen put nets across various fingers of the tributaries, and they go out every morning for a couple of hours to check on all the nets. I'm sure we have a bit of an environmental impact by doing this, but I don't think it's at all unsustainable. In addition, the river forms the northern boundary of our study area forest and the village's exploited forest to the north, so there are always plenty of other fishermen doing the same thing as well.

Bushmeat, on the other hand, is strictly forbidden on our side of the Lokoro. Everyone knows that the people around here are hunters, and that they regularly consume the spoils of the forest hunts. But everyone also knows that the stretch of forest that we are using as a study site is completely off limits to hunting. "The garden of the animals," as Papa Endu endearingly refers to it. And of the food we have portered in to camp from the village, all is vegetable; none is animal. Really, it would be nice to have some goat or chicken every once in a while, but the villagers don't raise livestock because of their proximity to the forest and its predators - a single leopard can decimate the village's animal population literally overnight.

So we are pesci-vegetarian at LuiKotal camp, and so are our local workers while they're here. With a few rare exceptions...

Today our top bonobo worker went out on the early morning shift with two of the researchers. He located the bonobo nest with them at 5:30am, and then continued on to some old nests to take measurements of their decay rates - a job he regularly does. When he was finished, he headed back to camp. He got home around 11am carrying a Wolf's guenon with its entrails hanging out. Apparently, the unfortunate little monkey was killed by an eagle, who was subsequently frightened away when Lambert came upon it. So Lambert got a fresh monkey without breaking the taboo on hunting in our forest.

I was pissed. I gave him shit, and told him he shouldn't be stealing the eagle's lunch. He said that it's not just the eagle's food, it's the human's food too, and anyway, this has happened three times before and it's been ok. Indeed, this is the fourth time within the past year or so that bonobo workers have come across fresh prey, dropped by the predator that caught it. And this is the fourth time over the past year or so that we've had fresh non-fish meat at camp.

I let Lambert know I wasn't pleased, and that the eagle should be able to eat what it catches. I can't encourage this sort of thing! Then I took some photos of the cook's assistant standing over the thing with his machete, and I asked the cook what sort of ingredients he would need for its preparation. He used a bit of tomato paste, salt, and hot pepper.

I didn't find it very satisfying. Granted, one monkey doesn't go very far in feeding ten people, so we each just got a little chunk. I think my chunk was a shoulder blade. I must have spent ten minutes trying to pry the meagre amount of meat and cartilage off of the bone, and only slightly less trying to chew it up. I think the best aspect was the little chunks of chili pepper stuck to the flesh. I passed when offered the last bit of 'sauce' from the bottom of the serving bowl. The worst was that the monkey-meat odour stayed on my hands for the next hour, well after washing them vigourously with soap.

So I've been at the camp for just about a month now, and I've had a whole four bites or so of monkey meat, in addition to all the varieties of fresh and smoked fish we get each day. I know I'm gonna get flak for this, but really, what should I have done? For the most part, the animals in our stretch of forest are free to just do their thing without fear of much more than eager stares through binoculars, in contrast to the bullets, arrows, and snares they'd face in most parts of the country. Over the coming months though, we're bound to have another such situation in which a freshly-killed animal is basically handed to us by some frightened predator, and I'll probably get to eat that one too. And inevitably, if I spend much time in the village, I'll be eating what they eat, which is what they hunt - the group that left a couple of weeks ago apparently had tortoise before catching their flight.

In the meantime though, we'll continue to eat our kwanga and greens. Last night we had fresh raw spinach ("what, you mean you don't even want it prepared!?") with a dressing of mustard and lime juice, and today we're having pondu. We got some nkoti in today, for the first time since I've been here, so I'll look forward to trying that in the next day or two. And of course the bananas, papayas, grapefruits, plantains, and fresh fish.

Unlike the rest of the Congolese population, it'll be a while until the next time we have any more bushmeat!