Keep that image in your mind, and visualize the sensations of your first bite. Envision the sublime texture between your teeth. Allow yourself to be swept away by the intoxicating aroma, and recall that transcendent moment when your mouth becomes a garden of earthly delights. Then imagine this process repeating over and over again, the pleasure growing more exquisite with every bite. Finally you dab your mouth with a napkin and recline lazily. Your belly is full and round; you pat it with blissful tenderness. You smile and sip your digestif, basking in the afterglow of a toe-curling foodgasm.
Eating balut is just like this, only the exact opposite.
~
To the naked eye, a balut looks much the same as any egg. Depending on the species of bird, the shell may be white or speckled, or even a dark brownish hue. It is only after the shell is cracked that you realize something is horribly, horribly wrong.
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| God's cruelest mistake. |
If you've ever eaten a hard boiled egg and thought, 'This is nice, but I wish there were more feathers, claws, and leathery membranes,' then balut would be an excellent food to try after your release from the sanitarium.
Balut are allegedly popular throughout Southeast Asia, and have recently ascended to near-mythic status in the region's street grub pantheon. Several years ago noted asshole and food enthusiast Anthony Bourdain sampled one in Saigon's Ben Thanh Market, sparking a new wave of balut fever (with congruent nausea and violent diahhrea). Balut challenges have also appeared on 'Fear Factor', 'Survivor', 'Ultimate Fighter', and many other TV shows popular amongst idiots. Today, most grizzled backpackers can tell at least three balut-related stories which are all synopsized with the tidy platitude, '...but actually it wasn't that bad!'
I assure you these people are full of shit.
~
In Vietnam, in-shell aborted avian fetuses are known as hot vit lon. They are a popular food amongst impotent middle aged men, social degenerates and alcoholics. Upstanding Vietnamese citizens do occasionally eat them as well, presumably to horrify their foreign friends. I have been forced to try hot vit lon several times during the past year by my local chums. The eggs are quite small, half the size of one's thumb. As such, they can be gulped quickly in a single mouthful without chewing. I have always considered these bite-sized treats as a fairly innocuous dinner time diversion, like eating a handful of jalapenos or snorting a line of salt.
When I visited the Philippines in August with my sisters Lizzie and Alexa, I insisted that we try some of the infamous balut, figuring that my battle-hardened stomach would have no problem with a slightly larger version of the familiar hot vit lon. I had forgotten the time honored aphorism that size matters.
~
On my sisters' final night in Boracay, we gathered with some friends for a seafood barbecue on the beach. Together with my Irish roommate Kieran and some Filipino friends named Cathy and Brandon, we gawked at the restaurant's wriggling menu of freshly-caught lobsters, crabs, prawns, snapper, and lapu-lapu. After placing our orders we relaxed at the table with several pitchers of icy mango mojitos, digging our toes in the sand and savoring our last evening together.
Alexa and I were trying to convince Lizzie to get matching sibling tattoos when Cathy, a lovely Filipino girl whom I would later want to strangle, was approached by an itinerant food vendor bearing a large styrofoam box on his shoulders. They spoke in rapid-fire Tagalog, a beautiful melodic language full of soft sounds and rolled consonants. I was so entranced by their hypnotic conversation that I failed to realize the vendor was selling balut.
Minutes later we were staring at the giant, heavy white eggs in our hands as Cathy and Brandon gave detailed instructions on how to properly consume the fertilized chicken embryos. Here is a condensed transcript:
1) Never, ever look in the egg.
2) Crack open the top.
3) Pour in vinegar and soy sauce.
4) Guzzle the embryo juice cocktail.
5) You didn't look inside, did you?
6) Stop crying and peel the egg.
7) Seriously, don't look.
8) Eat the deformed baby chicken curled around its thick, curdled yolk.
9) Pick the feathers and beak out of your teeth.
10) Renounce your faith in the goodness of humanity.
Before we ate the balut, we looked like this.
When we finished, we looked like this:
But actually, it wasn't that bad.
I profoundly agree with your last statement. "It's really not that bad." Thank you though. Your last picture is perfect for showing people what congruent nausea and violent diarrhea looks like. Hope the poor woman made it through. Ciao!
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