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Some Unusual Food

Warning/Disclaimer: This article may be shocking to some people. If you hate watching shows like Survivor or Fear Factor, you are advised not to read on. The writer absolves himself from all responsibility. You have been warned.

For the brave-hearted, I dare you to scroll down.

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I have blogged about unusual food before, e.g. dog meat being served in a hotel in China. This post is about more strange food found around the Asian region including Singapore.

We all know that live frogs are abundant in urban Singapore. No, not in ponds in the countryside but in fish tanks in coffeeshops, usually alongside tanks of live crabs.


Some people relish eating frogs. Their (usually the frogs') most fleshy parts are their legs. Hence we have stalls selling an assortment of dishes cooked with frog legs - porridge, claypot stew, stir-fried with spring onion and ginger, etc.


Eating frogs, even if the whole frog is eaten and not just its legs, is considered cruel by some people. It is just like eating turtles and tortoises - these creatures usually have a long life, if they didn't end up prematurely on our tables, that is.

Yet what is so different about eating these creatures compared to eating fish, prawns and crabs? One colleague told me that fishes do not feel any pain because they don't have nerves. Well, that may or may not be true but it did make me feel less guilty about eating my favourite yu sheng (raw fish) dish.

What I have narrated so far is still quite tame when compared to the exotic food you could find in this region. If you have been to China, Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam or the Philippines, you may have seen even more unusual street-hawker fare.


Like scorpions and locusts(?)

A few weeks ago, a colleague brought back a box of snacks from Thailand. The price tag on it said 150 bahts or about S$6.40, not cheap by any standard. I was expecting a savoury treat but when I opened the box, I got a nasty surprise.


They looked deceivingly like french fries especially those cut by a curvy knife but on closer examination, I realised that it was actually a box of crispy fried maggots! Only my bravest colleague dared to eat them. He claimed that they tasted like fried anchovies and were actually quite delicious. (In fact, he nearly finished the whole box!)

"Nice, try?", he said while offering the last few pieces to me. I screamed squirmed and replied, "Nice try". Despite the title of this blog, this is one challenge that I will never take up.

Yet when you compare the above snacks with what one blogger tried in Cambodia, they all seem quite mild.


Photo taken from www.weirdmeat.com

It's a fried spider! Mind you, not your average "next-door spider" but the "large American tarantula" type, okay?

It makes the recent story of a man who found a cooked spider in his kai lan sounds quite uninteresting, doesn't it?

While we are on this topic, Chun See's article about itinerant food vendors of yesteryears reminds me of a roadside hawker who sold a rather unusual dish in Singapore in the 1960s.

The closest modern-day food I could think of is the balut, a fertilized duck (or chicken) egg with a nearly-developed embryo inside that is boiled and eaten in the shell. It may sound gross to you but it is considered a delicacy in Asia especially in the Philippines, Cambodia, and Vietnam.


The version sold in Singapore in the 1960s was cooked differently. It was called gai chai dan in Cantonese (鸡仔蛋) meaning literally "foetal chicken egg". The embryonic egg was not cooked in its shell. Instead, the contents were cooked in soup contained in an enamelled metal basin. I don't know what else went into the soup but having tried it once or twice before, I remember that it smelled strongly of ginger and actually quite tasty. Your order would probably include a whole chick carcass (with newly-formed feathers, beak and all) and some yellow stuff that looked like poached egg, probably the chick's "leftover dinner". :p

The stall was located at the same spot in Queen Street every night, i.e. it did not move from place to place. It would be business as usual when there was no rain. Customers sat around the stall on small 8-inch-tall wooden stools and devour their gai chai dan in the dim flickering light provided by a Milo can contraption. (When you are eating such a dish, perhaps it is better that you couldn't see so clearly.)


Photo by courtesy of National Archives of Singapore, showing a roadside hawker and customers sitting on little wooden stools

Fortunately for some, this dish somehow didn't catch on in Singapore. Otherwise, today it could have been more common than chicken rice or chilli crab.

Some Unusual Sights At East Coast Park (3)

Those of you who happened to be at Tiong Bahru Market on 7 May 2008 (Wed) morning would have feasted your eyes on Joanne Peh and other young pretty MediaCorp actresses doing some marketing in their bikinis. (The "marketing" that they were doing was the buying of items like live frogs and squids and had absolutely nothing to do with Joanne Peh's so called "newly grown" assets and their attractive bodies.)


Well, I certainly missed out on that tantalizing display of assets by the bevy of young beauties. All I saw was the rather mild and disappointing photos in the New Paper report the next day. I said "disappointing" because as you probably know, everything looks flat on paper, even Mount Fuji.

So when I saw what looked like someone flying her oversized bra at East Coast Park last Saturday, I thought to myself, "Ah, every dog has its day".


I did a quick scan of the surroundings to see if there was any top-heavy woman gone topless. But all I saw was this dark-complexion man:


He was flying his Revolution kite (Revo). And if you think he's called a "kite flyer", go fly a kite - pardon the language but he's called a pilot, ok?

A Revo is a very maneuverable sport kite that is controlled by a four-line system. With movements of your thumbs forward and backward, it gives you the ability to fly the kite forward, backward, sideways, speed up or slow down, even come to a complete stop i.e. hovering in mid-air like a helicopter. You can even spin the kite like a propeller - you choose whether to spin it clockwise or anti-clockwise - the control is at your finger-tips, literally.

Utilizing these unique characteristics, pilots can fly just about anywhere, whether individually or in formation flying with other fliers. They can even pit their skills against other fliers in a competition.

Watch the Revo kite-flying video here:


(Sorry, as you can see from the video, the kite was so fast that I had trouble keeping it framed all the time. As this is my first YouTube upload for my blog, please be more forgiving.)

Believe it or not, the Revo was invented way back in 1989! (Hmm..., how come I only know about it now?) You can read about the history of the Revo here.

But get this - if you are interested in flying the Revo, be prepared to have US$269 (S$365) fly away first (sorry for the pun). That amount of money will only buy you a basic Revo, complete with lines. So better start saving S$1 every day for one whole year if you plan to fly the Revo a year from now. That is certainly a far cry from the 5 or 10 cents I used to pay the Ah Neh of the mama stall for my paper kite in the 1960s. And if I made my own kite, it was even free. But then again, my kite was not so fun to play with... and it also didn't look like a pair of bra.

FURTHER READING

Read about the many different types of kites here.

Earlier Posts In This Series:

1. Some Unusual Sights At East Coast Park (1)

2. Some Unusual Sights At East Coast Park (2)

The Blame Game

Like it or not, whenever something goes wrong that affects the public, the government often ends up getting the blame. When Mas Selamat escaped, some people called for the Minister for Home Affairs to take responsibility and step down.

The LTA (Land Transport Authority) is another government agency that is often blamed when accidents happen. When the trailer transporting concrete slabs skidded, fell on its side and blocked all 4 lanes of the PIE, some people felt that LTA should not allow such heavy vehicles on the expressways during busy hours. Some even thought that heavy vehicles should be banned from using the expressways at all times.

When the driver stopped his car abruptly in the fast lane of the CTE to insert his cash card thereby causing a motorcyclist to collide into another car, he thought that he was totally blameless! He didn't say this but while grinning in court, he must be thinking that if the LTA didn't erect a ERP gantry there, the accident wouldn't have happened at all. And why fine him only $200 if he had committed a serious offence?

When 8-year-old Russell Koh died after being flung out of the mini-van taking him to school, it was because LTA didn't heed earlier calls for safety belts to be installed in all school buses. And so the blame game goes on.

Some ask accusingly, "Why does the government always have to wait for something tragic to happen before it does something?" Yet when the LTA recently banned taxis from stopping anywhere else except at taxi stands in the CBD, the public asked if there was any precedence of accidents caused by taxis not stopping at taxi stands. The LTA was also accused of being insensitive to the needs of the elderly and the disabled people.

But if the government doesn't take the blame, then who does? After all, the government runs the country and therefore it is reasonable to assume that it is ultimately responsible for all the flaws in its systems as well as in the civil servants who run the systems. Of course, it is understandable that systemic and human failures do happen every now and then, and not all of them are preventable or even foreseeable.

Having said that, in the case of Mas Selamat's escape, it is sad that nobody saw the whole picture except Mas himself. He certainly made very good use of all the systemic and human weaknesses for his very dramatic and successful escape. It all looked very complicated but it was actually very simple.

The WRDC superintendent probably thought that window grilles were not crucial because the area outside the window was still a guarded area. But why install doors to the toilet cubicles at all when the guards were supposed have line-of-sight of the prisoners at all times? Oh, so the toilet was supposed to be used by visitors and hence toilet doors must be in place? Okay, then don't allow prisoners to use that toilet for heaven's sake! Make them wear diapers if you can't construct another toilet for them.

Also, why put a female officer in the team that guards a dangerous male prisoner? Not enough MANpower? Afraid that prisoners get MANhandled? Lame excuses.

Finally, why was the old CCTV system switched off when the new ones weren't even operational yet? We all know that for any crucial system, there should always be a parallel run to ensure continuity. For goodness sake, if it is not already done, please remember to install motion detectors as well, if there is not going to be anyone watching the CCTV monitors 24x7. And don't forget to link the motion detectors to a very loud alarm system. Test the systems regularly to ensure that they are working. Have exercises and dry-runs frequently to make sure that procedures and processes run smoothly when required.