The Chickens of Vietnam and Cambodia

Here’s the scene: Our group is exploring the ruins of Angkor Wat in Cambodia. It is a hot February afternoon - the temperature is somewhere in the 90’s and the sun is shining from a cloudless sky. We move to the welcome shade of a grove of trees, and as we enter the shade I become aware of an unearthly sound permeating the air. “What’s that sound?” I ask our Cambodian guide. “Ah!” he replies, “Those are cicadas. They are really nice!” For a second I think he’s saying they make a nice sound. Then I wonder if perhaps he means that the insects themselves are nice. But I quickly reach the obvious conclusion that he’s talking about how they taste. He confirms this by adding, “You catch them in the trees and fry them - very nice!” Then our Vietnamese guide interjects, “That’s just wrong!” At first I think he’s rejecting the concept of eating insects until he adds, “You have to catch them when they first come out of the ground! Once they’re living in the trees they’re too tough.” Then a short argument ensues about the proper way to prepare and eat cicadas. While most of us in the US have not gotten on the insect bandwagon, cicadas are a high-protein, low-fat, low-carb food that have been eaten for centuries in Asia (and in certain circles right here in the US). Later our Vietnamese guide got to the heart of the point that this story illustrates by declaring, “Here, if it moves, we eat it.”

Perhaps that statement is an oversimplification, but when we visited the market in the Vietnamese river town of Sa Dec, it certainly seemed like every possible thing that moved by walking, swimming, or flying or that grew in the ground, was available to be purchased and prepared for dinner.

Sa Dec Vietnam, Feb. 2019

There were vendors selling every sort of fruit and vegetable imaginable and many that were completely unknown to me. There was also meat. One vendor was selling rats - butchered and ready for cooking. These, I was told, were nice healthy rats from the countryside, not low-quality urban rats. The type of animal any particular meat came from was usually easy to identify because vendors would start with whole carcasses and the head would also be for sale. Also, many live animals were available. I saw lots of chickens - trussed and looking stressed and confused. There was, without a doubt, a cultural disconnect here - while I saw suffering, the average shopper saw dinner. I should stress that selling live poultry is a practicality; with refrigeration not universally available, buying a live chicken assures that the meat will not be spoiled before it can be cooked. Also, unlike the average American shopper, the shoppers at Sa Dec know exactly where their meat comes from.

There were also eggs! Both free-range and caged chicken eggs as well as duck eggs and quail eggs. The eggs were available as fresh eggs and trứng bách thảo - “hundred year eggs.” And the duck eggs were available either fresh or as trứng vịt lộn - or incubated, thus containing developing duck embryos. Incubated eggs are indeed nutritious and many Asian cultures consider them delicious. Popular folk wisdom in Vietnam is that they are healthful and beneficial for pregnant women.

And there were baby ducks and chicks for sale at the market - for people to buy to populate the flocks I saw free-ranging everywhere! Everywhere I travelled I saw chickens - on the urban streets of Hanoi, pecking and scratching on the grounds of Buddhist monasteries , and plentifully in the hamlets along the Mekong River in Cambodia.

In one such village, Cheung Kok, I found a woman who crafted things out of coconuts & other natural material for sale to the tourists. Given the fact that I was a tourist, and that she’d made some unique and delightful coconut chickens, I decided it was incumbent upon me to buy one. It was only after we left the village that I pulled my chicken from its shopping bag and noticed that there was a tag with the artisan’s name on it. She's Mrs. Hen. How perfect is that?!