Steven Rinella is the author of "The Scavenger's Guide to Haute Cuisine" and a contributor to Outside magazine. He lives in Alaska.
As a writer, my biggest professional shortcoming is that I'm not very professional. I can't maintain objective distance from my subjects. Relationships that begin as interviews often morph into friendships, or the opposite of friendships. I've always known this habit of mine would lead to a bad end. But I never dreamed that end would involve eating a duck fetus.
Balut, as the dish is formally known, is a Filipino delicacy made from an embryonic duckling boiled alive in its shell, one week before birth. Not being a regular consumer of fetal fare, I'd never heard of balut until I traveled to the country to do a magazine story about an American rafting expedition down a remote river in the highlands of Luzon Island. The group I was with ranged from a purple-haired programmer to a soap-opera actor who thought that a wilderness adventure might help him give up the bottle. Our team leader was Gretchen, a tall, strong-willed woman who claimed to be sponsored by an adventure swimwear company.
From the start, the journey was cursed. First there was a snafu with customs over the importation of rubber rafts, then things got completely derailed when Maoist rebels closed the only road leading to the river. Tensions flared.
More specifically, tensions flared between Gretchen and me. Apparently, her sponsorship by an American corporation not only dictated that she constantly wear an assortment of bulletproof-looking bikini tops, but also that she enforce the strictures of "culturally sensitive eco-tourism" with the grim seriousness of a Sunday school teacher.
Without even trying, I violated most of Gretchen's rules. In the name of journalistic curiosity, I inquired about the cost of an elderly prostitute in Manila; I found a screaming deal on local rum and made a large purchase; I attended a cockfight; I wheeled and dealed with an artisan for a wooden phallus with an ashtray scrotum.
The situation came to a head when Gretchen and I got into a screaming fight about ugly Americans. She said I was the definition of an ugly American; I countered that the "Ugly American" is actually a good guy in the 1958 book of that title, by Eugene Burdick and William Lederer, which lambastes U.S. foreign policy. She'd never heard of the book, but that didn't stop her from suggesting that I was fucked up in my interpretation of it.
That argument unresolved, soon Gretchen and I were locked in a war in which we each tried to live out exaggerated versions of our own travel ideologies. She expressed moral outrage at poverty and scowled at artisans who peddled trinkets made of rare species of trees. I indulged a budding fascination for a bar called the Hobbit, which only hires dwarves and midgets and serves up nightly doses of British rock played by drug-addled expatriates.
Enter balut. It was the one thing Gretchen and I agreed on. Or, rather, the acceptance of balut was something we agreed on. Me, because I'd been bragging about how I'd eat anything the country had to offer. Gretchen, because any American who was worth his or her passport would never scowl at a token of international goodwill.
Our showdown came during a meal hosted by government tourism officials who hoped to make up for our thwarted rafting plans. Two duck eggs arrived at our table along with an explanation that it was the national dish. It was clear by the amused looks on everyone's faces that we were in for something interesting.
Eager to land the first punch, I followed the chef's instructions and tapped a hole through the shell. I poked through a gauzy membrane coursed with blood vessels, then sucked out the broth.
As the liquid met my lips, I overheard someone say "amniotic fluid." Nausea rolled through me with the image of a little duck fetus, curled up and sucking its thumb. Mind over matter, I told myself. Gretchen was still prodding her egg while I ripped into mine with gusto, blindly packing the brackish contents into my mouth.
I now know that balut has many powers: It's an aphrodisiac; it replaces lost sleep; it wards off Aswang, which are super-scary Filipino monsters that attack at night and suck out your guts. But at that moment, with balut in my mouth, I was aware of nothing except its wretched taste. A duck embryo contains 176 milligrams of phosphorous -- which, believe me, is plenty. It tastes the way the air smells after a night of fireworks have been lighted off.
The only thing that stopped me from regurgitating was the intense look of jealousy on Gretchen's face. My lips had curled into a grimace of disgust, but as I turned to face her, I stubbornly replaced that expression with one of enjoyment. I knew my face also had to show something deeper still: an enlightened awareness that traveling to a new land meant nothing unless you were willing to embrace it fully.
But the second phase of balut eating -- which involved sorting through the contents of my mouth with my tongue, isolating boney bits to decide which could be swallowed whole, which should be chewed first, and which should be plucked out -- threatened to compromise my carefully arranged expression. After discarding a section of beak and one leg, I struggled the duckling down.
Our Filipino hosts erupted in applause. It was all for me. I'd done America a good turn. Gretchen's egg was untouched. My intent was to let the applause die, and then go into the bathroom to purge. But Gretchen did something puzzling.
She passed me her egg. "You like 'em so much," she grinned.
To this day, I wonder: Did my charade so fool her that she buried the hatchet and surrendered her egg for my enjoyment? Or was she screwing with me? At the time, I didn't analyze it. Instead, I did what any trigger-happy, red-blooded American would do in a foreign land.
I choked it down. And smiled.
Next page: Julie Powell: "No cheese, no tomato, certainly no pickles or mustard"