Rachael Kinley, producer-director
I’d been vegetarian for 10 years when I began working for the BBC’s Natural History Unit on the series Human Planet. Over three years’ filming, I ended up eating sago grubs, monkeys, sloths, cuscus (a cute marsupial) and pig heart – all a massively unexpected departure from spinach and lentils.
These forays into meat all began in West Papua. After taking eight flights, travelling for two days by canoe and trekking for a day, we arrived in a remote village where we were planning to film the Korowai constructing a new house 40 metres up in the tree canopy. Two weeks into our stay, they presented us with giant sago grubs on a cooked on a skewer as a special treat and watched expectantly as we devoured a massive bowlful. They are about as big as your thumb and leathery on the outside. As you bite into them, a fluid bursts out. One end of them (their mouth) is very chewy. Our hosts would have been upset had we not tucked in as they had spent a long time gathering and preparing them. The Korowai people have whole festivals devoted to these grubs.
At the end of filming, they killed a prize pig for a celebration meal. It was a massive honour, but having just about coped with the grubs, I found it hard to stomach pig’s heart and valves. Through all this though, I discovered that people around the world found the concept of being a vegetarian odd, confusing and sometimes offensive, so I had to swiftly get my head around eating meat.
My tastes have definitely been expanded by these experiences and I’ve since dined on rat, jellyfish and crocodile. And I must admit, I enjoyed them all.
Mike Dilger, broadcaster and naturalist
Before I worked as a reporter for programmes like The One Show, I spent nearly five years working as a biologist in the tropics. Carrying out flora and fauna surveys in the tropical forests of Ecuador, Vietnam and Tanzania, I had the opportunity to see some astonishing wildlife and eat some frankly bizarre foods. In Vietnam particularly my palate was tested like never before, with porcupine curry (the animal was roadkill in my defence), famously smelly durian fruits, 1,000-year-old eggs and deep-fried, day-old chicks.
My worst experience by far came when I was leading a survey in remote forests close to the border with Laos. When a visitor arrives, the village people celebrate by slaughtering a pig. I had seen how these animals lived and what they ate on a daily basis, snuffling around in human refuse for food – in other words, the pigs were the clean-up squad for the village. One of the pigs was duly caught and dispatched with a quick slash of the throat. Apparently, a delicacy in Vietnam is to eat the coagulated pig’s blood with raw large intestines on top as an appetiser. Faced with insulting the community by not eating my bowlful, I braced myself for a mouthful, but the moment I tried to swallow the first spoonful my throat decided it wasn’t having any of it and ejected it forcefully.
After a frankly embarrassing meal, I had to sit down to discuss working with the community, which is fairly difficult with a shirt stained all the way down in pig’s blood!
Brian Leith, creative director
A few years ago, I spent a few weeks on location in a remote part of the Republic of the Congo to film gorillas. We stayed in a camp deep in the rainforest, which required several days’ travel by aeroplane, 4WD vehicle, river pirogue and, finally, feet. The Ndoki area is about as far from civilisation as it’s possible to get. As you can imagine, we were surviving on minimal and basic rations, and quite hungry by meal times. We camped in a magical little clearing deep in the dense forest with a circular view of the heavens – stars and a brilliant milky way – directly above us in the evening.
One night, our French-Congolese chef, Marcel, made a huge pot of spaghetti for dinner which we were all thrilled about after trailing the gorillas all day. But we were all horrified to see a huge praying mantis descend out of the forest clearing and spin down directly on to our pot of spaghetti. It struggled in the gloop for a few moments and then – to our horror – it started to hatch something out of its rear end … We watched in silent amazement as the mantis apparently gave birth to what looked like a large white worm – itself writhing painfully out of its prison home. Only later did we realise that this must have been an intestinal parasite freeing itself from the doomed mantis’s gut. Marcel burst upon the scene visibly aghast at what was happening… “Oh nnoooo…!” he exclaimed, and before we could stop him he’d lifted the entire pan off the table and – to our equal horror – chucked the lot on to the camp fire with a loud sizzling sound. Relieved as we were not to be eating a mantis worm for dinner, we were heartbroken to lose our beautiful meal.
Tom Hugh-Jones, series producer, BBC Natural History Unit
Curiously enough, some of my most outrageous meals were consumed not on trips filming wildlife for the BBC but when I was a child. Many parents struggle with their kids’ fussy eating habits, but that wasn’t a concern for mine. When I was about five years old my parents, both anthropologists at the time, took me to the Amazon jungle to live with a tribe they were doing field research with. I remember that on my first day in the forest, travelling by canoe upriver to a tribal settlement, the locals pulled out their blowpipes and began firing darts at monkeys in the trees along the riverbank. I was so shocked I began to scream to frighten the monkeys away and save their lives. It worked, but it didn’t go down well with the locals, who were living on the brink of starvation, constantly hunting for their next meal.
Monkeys, tapir, snakes, toucans, peccaries, ants, caterpillars and caiman were all part of my diet, and by the end I even had my own mini-blowpipe and bow and arrow.
So it was a strange experience when one of my first assignments for Planet Earth took me back to the Amazon and I found myself filming the animals I once used to hunt for food. I would keep saying to the cameraman, “They taste nice.” And I kept coming across familiar smells and tastes that evoked half-forgotten but vivid childhood memories.
My job has taken me all over the world and I have been served all sorts of exotic delights, from tortoise cooked in its shell to a jellyfish curry spiced with added sting, but the bizarre creatures I ate as a kid have enabled me to stomach most things. The only thing I can’t deal with is sago grubs – they made me retch uncontrollably as a child, and always will.
Mike, Rachael, Brian and Tom will share their Really Wild Food stories for the BBC as part of Bristol Food Connections 2015 on Monday 6 May – visit bristolfoodconnections.com for information and tickets.
Listen online to the stories that appeared on BBC Radio 4’s The Food Programme here
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