Adventures in Eating: Anthropological Experiences in Dining from Around the World

2: Boiled Eggs with Chicks Inside, or What Commensality Means

21 Biographical sketch. Roger Lohmann first visited the Asabano as a graduate student in 1991, during a self-funded trip to explore possible research sites. Idealistically hoping to live among people living an entirely indigenous lifestyle , he was disappointed to discover that everyone professed Christianity and had abandoned secret male initiations, the use of ancestral bones to aid hunting and gardening, and traditional food taboos. Fortified with an interest in discovering what kinds of evidence convince people to abandon and adopt religious beliefs, Lohmann decided to return to the Asabano for his Ph.D. research. With a Fulbright grant and approval from his anthropology committee at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, he spent a year and a half during 1994–1995 in Papua New Guinea (Figure 2.1). After receiving his doctorate in 2000 and teaching at various institutions, he won a tenure-track position at Trent University in 2003. Together with his collaborator and wife, Professor Heather M.-L. Miller of the University of Toronto, he spent a month in 2005 with the Asabano, and in 2007, Lohmann returned with two students for two months. C h a p t e r T w o Roger Ivar Lohmann Boiled Eggs with Chicks Inside, or What Commensality Means Roger Ivar Lohmann 22 Appetizer Most everyone in my New Guinea village loves sago grubs. Steamed in leaves, “[t]hey taste just like hot buttered bread!” a friend enthused. To me they look like tubes of fat the size of breakfast sausages, ribbed for your pleasure, only with sharp jaws on one end for gnawing their way through the decaying logs in which they live (Figure 2.2). Enthralled though I was with the idea of submersing myself in another culture, studiously living, feeling, and thinking as the Asabano did, I drew the line at eating grubs. Unlike Helen Haines’s (this volume) avoidance of jungle rat in Belize largely because of its name, I do not think the barrier for me was the admittedly unappetizing linguistic association with the word grubs (in American culture grubs are not food, although grub is slang for food . . . hmmm). I might have brought myself to eating them cooked, until I heard that people enjoyed them live as well. The fact that this seemed downright cruel to me was overshadowed with disgust on so many other levels. I discovered an implicit rule of my own culture: animals should not be eaten when they are still alive and moving (see Cattell, this volume, on the challenge of eating moving termites). Not only was this a bug, it was a huge, soft, juicy bug (for Cattell, small, living bugs were acceptable with effort, but large, cooked bugs were not). No, thank you. “We know; white people do not like these. They are black people’s food,” I was told in a way that simultaneously reassured me that I was accepted and underlined my difference. My friend Simolibo, perhaps to emphasize our common bond, commented that actually he did not like grubs raw, either. “It goes back to when I was little,” he explained. “I was about to take a bite out of one when it bit me, 2.1. Map of Papua New Guinea showing research location. (Map by Roger Lohmann) Boiled Eggs with Chicks Inside, or What Commensality Means 23 and my lip bled!” Simolibo’s story goes to show that food taboos are all built from experiences, and they are ultimately personal (see Chaiken, this volume). Food taboos, implicit and explicit, call attention to differences among people through their use as barriers. However, they can just as easily invite—or dare—border crossings and mutual understanding. As Susan Johnston (this volume) notes, people may change their menus in an effort to reach out to culturally foreign guests. In my case, I prepared my body to accept foods that I expected to encounter in Papua New Guinea. A year or so before I began my longest sojourn in Papua New Guinea, I had become a vegetarian for reasons of environmentalism. As my time of departure drew near, I slowly began eating meat again, since I did not want to refuse local foods and in this way separate myself from the people I was to study. I also knew what kinds of food were available locally and doubted whether I would be able to physically survive on such a diet without meat. Had I remained a...