How a gourmet can start a pandemic

Dead bats at a butcher’s stall in an Indonesian street market. Representation pic/Getty Images

What do monkeys, bats, chicken, civets, rats and pangolins have in common?
Answer: They all carry pandemic-causing viruses that have killed millions of human beings.

Here's question #2: what else do monkeys, bats, chicken, civets, rats and pangolins have in common?
Answer: We eat them. Worldwide, including in advanced civilisations that think no end of themselves like Europe and America, wild animal meat, sometimes imported, is cooked and relished.

Scientists have long known that animals carry viruses that are bad news when they jump from the animal to human beings. Such diseases are called zoonotic, and as I write this, 70% of human diseases - from the common cold to malaria, influenza, ebola and HIV - are of animal, non-human origin.

Bats are notorious for carrying a whole archive of different coronaviruses. Some will just give you the sniffles but with others, like the SARS-CoV-2, which causes COVID-19, death can be brutal, gasping for breath.

Congo's Ebola outbreak of 2014 started when the virus jumped from a green monkey, which they love to eat grilled, to humans.

The Spanish flu of 1918, came to us through the chicken, ducks and pigs we breed and eat. It killed 40-50 million.

AIDS is believed to have reached humans through a Congolese chimpanzee. It killed 35 million.

The COVID-19 pandemic, with 2.2 million dead so far is among the smaller pandemics we have endured.

But now you're wondering whether you should just skip the flambeéd fruit bat hors d'oeuvres and the sweet and sour rats cooked in wine and go straight for dessert.

I have good news and terrible news. Eating cooked bushmeat will probably give you nothing more than a nice story to regale people with at parties. The terrible news is that you bought the meat at a market and then cooked it at home. Pandemics start when animals are butchered and humans come into contact with their blood and fluids.

To nip it all in the bud, I dug out the top recipes for cooking these yummy, lethal morsels so that you may understand how pandemics spread through the things gourmets do.

Pangolin stew like mum makes it

Authentic Central African recipe. Bang it against a table to separate soul from body. Set on fire to burn off the hair. If the scaly kind, de-scale and powder the scales to sell as a fake cure for erectile dysfunction. Now eviscerate and skin the animal, wash, cut into chunks and stew with lots of ginger and lemongrass, and onions, tomatoes and bell peppers.

As it cooks, the pangolin releases aromas nostalgically reminiscent of urine and faeces. This apparently, is what makes it a delicacy, since no other animal also tastes like it smells.

FYI: The current COVID-19 pandemic was traced to pangolins sold at a wet market in Wuhan. The pangolins were likely bitten by bats carrying the virus. In February 2019, 33 tons of pangolin meat were found in Malaysia.

Grilled rats cooked in Coca Cola

Skin a dozen large rats, lay them on a bed of smashed lemongrass stems. Shower them liberally with finely chopped garlic, galangal and fiery chillies. Cover them with lemongrass leaves, sprinkle lots of sea salt and sugar and Kaffir lime leaves. Pour a whole litre of Coca Cola over it and cook it till it's done.

The French make grilled rats Bordeaux-style using rats that live in wine cellars. After skinning, they are brushed with a thick sauce of olive oil and crushed shallots and char-grilled over a fire of broken wine barrels.

Rat stew is a local speciality of West Virginia, born when their mining industry collapsed.

FYI: Fleas that lived in rat fur caused the bubonic plague of 1347, which killed an estimated 200 million people.

Soul-warming fruit bat soup

Mix lemon juice and soy sauce with chopped onion, adding hot dried pepper to taste. Boil the whole fruit bat in a pot of water for about 2 hours until its skin is tender enough to tear through. Drain the water and add coconut milk, with salt to taste, and cook for another 10 minutes. Serve with a hot sauce and rice.

You could skin the bat and remove the fur to get to the meat but the aficionado will chew the bat, suck out the meat and then discard the remaining fur.

FYI: Bats of all kinds are flying reservoirs of entire families of coronaviruses. Since bats don't interact with humans, we usually get the disease through livestock or bushmeat that has been bitten and infected by a bat.

There are two lessons in all this -

Lesson 1: Don't blame the Chinese. There are enough deadly viruses in the wild animals and birds we eat as delicacies.

Lesson 2: So stop eating them.

Here, viewed from there. C Y Gopinath, in Bangkok, throws unique light and shadows on Mumbai, the city that raised him. You can reach him at cygopi@gmail.com. Send your feedback to mailbag@mid-day.com

The views expressed in this column are the individual's and don't represent those of the paper