Society

Man Eat Frog

A crunchy tour of the entomologist's theme park

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Man Eat Frog
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You'd think, from the way people in Kohima go on about the health effects of each exotic food, they're all food cranks here. The little green tree frogs, de-gutted and cooked whole: good for treating post-surgery patients. Snails, boiled in bamboo shoot, water and salt, and sucked from their shell like marrow: cures anaemia and improves vision. Bee grubs, smoked and preserved for a crispy snack: helps cancer patients. But if this is health food, they are going at it with a different passion. In Kohima, like perhaps any other town without cinema theatres and bars, and a single coffee parlour that stays open late (5.30 pm), food is a prime preoccupation: three large meals, mostly a mound of fragrant local rice with spicy pork or beef, sometimes fish, between daybreak and 4pm, when the sun sets and all Kohima draws down its shutters like a town under curfew. But it's more than that: food is a reason for getting together, for impromptu feasts to tide over the intervals before the next official festival. And no child is born or wed without the clan turning up, each bearing a special dish for the occasion—smoked pork cooked with fermented beans, fish coated in chilli paste and baked in bamboo tubes, crispy, spicy slivers of venison, pork, beef, all designed to last for the weeks a wedding spreads over in Nagaland.

But these days, not everyone approves of these exuberant traditional customs. For instance, a wedding planner, one of the scores of young Nagas who are abandoning successful careers in metros to return home to Kohima to open their own businesses, described her distress when guests began to arrive, bearing gifts of food they expected would be served at the wedding feast. It upset her carefully planned wedding menu, but that curiously memorable wedding meal—a fusion of the new taste for Chinese fare and Punjabi balti with what the clansmen insisted on contributing, all washed down by generous plastic bucketfuls of rice beer—is what best describes Kohima today.

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