Most of us try to keep rodents away from our food -- but in some places, rats are the food.
In fact, rat-based meals have turned into a cottage industry in Mozambique, where rat hunters earn the equivalent of a couple of dollars a day catching rats and selling them on skewers.
Think rat-kabob.
The biggest problem with rat cuisine isn't that people are dining on rats -- it's how they catch the critters.
In Mozambique, where rats are sold as roadside fare skewered on a stick -- six or seven rats for around 30 cents -- rat hunters set fires to chase the rodents out of the brush. But those fires can spread, and they routinely destroy homes and even kill people. The country's Wildlife Service says 60 wildfires set by rat hunters destroyed 200 homes in 2008, killing 15 people.
That's led the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization to work with a local organization called the Initiative for Communal Lands in an effort to teach people to raise rats so they don't have to hunt them with brush fires.
Rat eating isn't exclusive to Mozambique. It's actually common in many areas and even encouraged in some places. Vijay Prakash, welfare secretary in India's Bihar state, made headlines around the world in 2008 when he suggested that poor people eat rats.
After all, they're not sacred cows. And since the pests eat the region's grain supplies, eating them will kill two rats with one mouth: People get fed, grain gets spared.
Rats have almost no bones and are quite rich in nutrition, Prakash told the BBC. People at large don't know this cuisine fact, but gradually they are catching up.
The BBC even noted that rat eating is popular in parts of Thailand and France. But while some people end up eating rat out of necessity, others do it out of tradition. Some even like it.
When CNN ran a story on poverty in Zimbabwe back in 2006, government officials took issue with images of families eating rats.
The eating of the field mice -- Zimbabweans do that. It is a delicacy, Machivenyika Mapuranga, Zimbabwe's ambassador to United States, told CNN. It is misleading to portray the eating of field mice as an act of desperation. It is not.
Cambodians have been known to eat dried or roasted rat as a drinking snack. And in neighboring Vietnam, rat eating goes back generations and was practically a national craze in 2008. A Wall Street Journal report at the time said the bird flu panic had many people looking for something else to eat.
In some places, rat dishes were selling for $4 -- a big expense in a country where many people make less than $50 a month.
But the Journal went far beyond financial reporting on this one: It's almost certainly the only time in the storied paper's 120-year history that it printed rat recipes: Ground Rat Meat and Chili, Rat Steamed With Lemon Leaves and Rat Stir Sauteed with Spring Onion and Herbs.
Link with pictures: http://www.aolnews.com/weird-news/a...ouille-rats-on-menu-around-the-world/19680161
In fact, rat-based meals have turned into a cottage industry in Mozambique, where rat hunters earn the equivalent of a couple of dollars a day catching rats and selling them on skewers.
Think rat-kabob.
The biggest problem with rat cuisine isn't that people are dining on rats -- it's how they catch the critters.
In Mozambique, where rats are sold as roadside fare skewered on a stick -- six or seven rats for around 30 cents -- rat hunters set fires to chase the rodents out of the brush. But those fires can spread, and they routinely destroy homes and even kill people. The country's Wildlife Service says 60 wildfires set by rat hunters destroyed 200 homes in 2008, killing 15 people.
That's led the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization to work with a local organization called the Initiative for Communal Lands in an effort to teach people to raise rats so they don't have to hunt them with brush fires.
Rat eating isn't exclusive to Mozambique. It's actually common in many areas and even encouraged in some places. Vijay Prakash, welfare secretary in India's Bihar state, made headlines around the world in 2008 when he suggested that poor people eat rats.
After all, they're not sacred cows. And since the pests eat the region's grain supplies, eating them will kill two rats with one mouth: People get fed, grain gets spared.
Rats have almost no bones and are quite rich in nutrition, Prakash told the BBC. People at large don't know this cuisine fact, but gradually they are catching up.
The BBC even noted that rat eating is popular in parts of Thailand and France. But while some people end up eating rat out of necessity, others do it out of tradition. Some even like it.
When CNN ran a story on poverty in Zimbabwe back in 2006, government officials took issue with images of families eating rats.
The eating of the field mice -- Zimbabweans do that. It is a delicacy, Machivenyika Mapuranga, Zimbabwe's ambassador to United States, told CNN. It is misleading to portray the eating of field mice as an act of desperation. It is not.
Cambodians have been known to eat dried or roasted rat as a drinking snack. And in neighboring Vietnam, rat eating goes back generations and was practically a national craze in 2008. A Wall Street Journal report at the time said the bird flu panic had many people looking for something else to eat.
In some places, rat dishes were selling for $4 -- a big expense in a country where many people make less than $50 a month.
But the Journal went far beyond financial reporting on this one: It's almost certainly the only time in the storied paper's 120-year history that it printed rat recipes: Ground Rat Meat and Chili, Rat Steamed With Lemon Leaves and Rat Stir Sauteed with Spring Onion and Herbs.
Link with pictures: http://www.aolnews.com/weird-news/a...ouille-rats-on-menu-around-the-world/19680161
