Tall tale not so tall after all: This week police found a dismembered
dead monkey in the vegetable crisper of a Congolese family living in Amsterdam.
Last week they pulled over a car in Limburg containing two Congolese residents on
the front seat, and dead monkey on the back seat. The reason: as it turns out
people from sub-Saharan Africa have a taste for simmered simian (with greens
and peanut sauce, as they've stated). And apparently they don't mind spending
good money and gas to get it, as monkey is not a featured item at your Dutch
butcher shop.
Anyone who's ever seen Indiana Jones And the temple Of Doom
knows that you can't argue over taste - although we have an unwritten law about
not eating your own species (Except in Papua New Guinea and some remote parts
of the Amazon). So if you are from Cameroon, Congo, Rwanda or around there, the
choice of monkey on the menu ain't so odd. Koreans eat dog. Us Dutchies eat raw
herring; Inuit (you can't say "Eskimo" no mo') eat seal blubber. You
eat what Mother Nature makes available, which sucks if you live in Antarctica
since I've been lead to believe that penguin tastes like licking the bottom of a
birdcage. And let's be frank: I would also prefer hunting monkey over hunting
lions or pythons, thereby having better odds on who is going to eat whom.
So what's happened in the meantime is a lively trade in this
kind of meat out of both France and Belgium where they DO stock this sort of
thing. The origin of the monkey meat is still a mystery, as I don't exactly see
anyone having a macaque farm in an Antwerp attic, or raising baboons in a barn
behind the Sacre Coeur.
It would seem more plausible that there's some sort of
semi-human trafficking going on where criminal organizations promise monkeys a
better life than what they have now in their Sub-Saharan "today a
tree dweller, tomorrow a baboon-on-rye mit a pickle and a glass tea"
environment. So they head of to jolly ole France where they find out there's no
everlasting banana tree; no job in a zoo, but instead it's a one-way trip to
the vegetable crisper after all.
So: can't we just lab-grow monkey meat like we've seen in
the news lately? It's much more efficient, and they only thing you'd have to do
for authentic mouth feel is a last minute sprinkling of coarse hair.
