Guinea pigs for dinner

In the Times recently, a reporter described dining on roast guinea pig at an Ecuadorean restaurant in Queens. Guinea pigs are eaten, and apparently enjoyed, in the countries of the Andes, and a painting in the cathedral in Cuzco, Peru, pictures Jesus dining on guinea pig with his disciples. The reporter’s description was less than enthusiastic:

There was very little meat, and it tasted somewhat similar to the dark meat of chicken, gamey like duck or rabbit. The meat was fatty and stringy at times. I had to pick it off the little ribs, and the skin was crunchy, with parts of it thicker with a chewy, almost rubbery, texture.

I was reminded of The Wine-Dark Sea by Patrick O’Brian, the 16th volume in the Aubrey-Maturin series, in which Dr. Maturin sets out on a perilous mission through the Peruvian Andes. The account of guinea pig is even less appealing there:

Three times that day, and at ever-increasing heights, they had left their mules in the hope of a partridge or a guanaco, and three times they had caught up with the llamas not indeed empty-handed, since Stephen carried a beetle or a low-growing plant for the pack of the animal that carried their collections, but without any sort of game, which meant that their supper would be fried guinea-pig and dried potatoes once more; and each time Eduardo had said that this was a strange, unaccountable year, with weather that made no sense and with animals abandoning customs and territories that had remained unchanged since before the days of Pachacutic Inca.

A few pages later, Maturin suggests shooting a vicuña for food, observing to his companion, “You yourself said that you were tired of fried guinea-pig and ham.” Eduardo quietly confirms this in a little while, when Maturin says he would like to dissect an unusual bird they have just bagged.

‘That would mean fried guinea-pig again,’ observed Eduardo.

The two eventually arrive at a Catholic mission, but the priests are nonplussed at having little to offer their guests. “Well,” says one at last, “there may be a few guinea-pigs left in the scriptorium.” One would think that O’Brian has exhausted the subject, yet his final unfinished novel (published under the title 21) features “a formal dinner given by an Argentine grandee, which includes lobster in a bitter chocolate sauce and 70 freshly harvested guinea pigs.”

The Eiffel Tower: Don't Fix It

Today’s Times ran a photo of a planned addition to the Eiffel Tower that, as readers noted, will make it look more like the Space Needle in Seattle or the parachute drop at Coney Island. The observation deck is said to be temporary, but then again, the Eiffel Tower itself only had a permit to stand for twenty years when it was finished in 1889.

I love the tower, and don’t feel it needs any improvements. I didn’t mind the Year 2000 countdown lights that we saw on the tower on our first trip to Paris in 1999, but the hourly light show that was happening every night when we went again in 2004 was a bit much. At least it distracted us from the only bad meal we had while we were there. (We should have known that wherever you are, the closer you get to a major tourist attraction the worse and the more expensive the food becomes.)

Paul Theroux on Travel

Paul Theroux has been criticized for being a grumpy, mean-spirited traveler. From my own experience of travel, I don’t think that’s true. Certainly he was never as grumpy as his ex-friend V.S. Naipaul — or Naipaul’s brother Shiva, who died in 1985 and whose North of South is one of the sourest books on Africa I’ve ever read. For all its surprises and rewards, travel can be tough. You get sick. You get lost. You have to fend off pickpockets at the Harare bus station. Your backpack is stolen from under your feet in Bulawayo. You find yourself stuck without a ride on a lonely road, with night approaching. Theroux’s travel writing acknowledges snags like these, and that is what makes it so believable. In an article for the Guardian, recently featured by Arts & Letter Daily, Theroux explained that his approach was a reaction to the airbrushed travel-supplement approach of the early 1960s.

The travel book was a bore. It annoyed me that a traveller hid his or her moments of desperation or fear or lust. Or the time he or she screamed at the taxi driver, or mocked the folk dancers. And what did they eat, what books did they read to kill time, and what were the toilets like? I had done enough travelling to know that half of travel was delay or nuisance — buses breaking down, hotel clerks being rude, market peddlers being rapacious. The truth of travel was interesting and off-key, and few people ever wrote about it.

(Oddly enough, in a recent interview that I wrote about earlier, Theroux said that he tries to leave out accounts of being sick or being delayed — that these sorts of things happen to everyone, and are not interesting to readers. Maybe he really meant that a little of that goes a long way.) Theroux decided early on that a travel book should be about travel — about moving from one place to another. Staying put in Malawi or Uganda or Singapore was more suited to fiction, he felt. There’s something to this as well. Although I can think of a number of fine nonfiction books that don’t cover much territory, many of the most successful, like Redmond O’Hanlon’s No Mercy, do involve overland traveling toward a goal, with a good deal of suffering along the way.