Vegetarianism: Appalling or Appealing

I am an adventurous eater and I love meat. Typically, subsiding on local cuisine is a highlight of my international travel. When it comes to food, I will unapologetically use the overused cliché, “I’ll try anything once.” After one day in Nigeria, however, I’m wondering if I should cross meat off the list for the rest of my stay.

LUNCH: I dined at the small restaurant that sits on the same property as the NGO I am working with. I had a delicious pile of rice colored yellow with what I imagine was broth and spices. Atop the pile were a few cubes of beef also nicely flavored, but terribly tough. I did my best to cut off small pieces with the dull butter knives offered at the table. Even the small bites squeaked and bounced my molars apart as downward pressure was released. I chalked it up to being a small informal lunch spot with little competition in the area.

DINNER: “Maybe I’ll have chicken,” I thought. After a brief description of the menu items I was not familiar with, I settled on somovita, a polenta-like maize dish, with vegetable soup and my meat of choice: chicken. It sounded delicious. And it was…mostly. The vegetable soup was spicy. Generous amounts of hot pepper made the predominantly spinach “soup” (it was more like a thin stew) exciting. Mmmmm. Fish bones found in the soup led me to believe that it was not just vegetables, but this was fine by my non-vegetarian standards. I appreciated the complexity of flavors. What I didn’t appreciate was small bulbous pieces of what I can only assume was cartilage. Maybe chicken kneecaps? Slices of beef hooves, perhaps? Whatever it was it looked like small mushrooms, but was definitively an animal product. I avoided them and headed for the large piece of meat that sat covered in the green goodness that dominated the bowl. At first I thought maybe they didn’t hear me say chicken. This beef was even tougher than the beef I had had at lunch. I could hardly separate it from the bone and it had a large outer layer of stiff gelatinous fat. This couldn’t be chicken…oh, but it was. Upon further investigative surgery it became apparent that the meat underneath was chicken – the texture and color was a dead giveaway. I couldn’t quite tell which part of the chicken sat on my plate, but I think a piece I had assumed was the bone of the beef when I was operating under the mix-up theory was the neck. I feverously sawed at the unrecognizable piece of poultry. The knife was not up to the task and I carefully tried to pull pieces of the chicken off with my bare hands (the somovita was meant to be eaten with ones fingers so I was well within social bounds). With a tag-team effort by the knife and fingers, I was successful at getting nibbles of chicken off the bone, but it was tedious. Too tedious, really, to make the less than mediocre morsels worth the work. I focused on the vegetable soup and avoiding the cartilage.

The lesson I seem to be learning here is that caging animals and force-feeding them corn to fatten them up and keep them tender is cruel, but is a drastic improvement over eating lean free-range animals in West Africa. I’ll give Nigerian meat a few more shots, but I may just have to become the first vegetarian to be motivated by the lack of animal cruelty.