Glimpse of the Past - 'The Borneo Story' Online

The Borneo Story: 'Birds Nest Soup' from The Doozer on Vimeo.

Catching up on leisure reading over New Year, I re-encountered the name of Tom Harrisson, who has been described as a "polymath" - pioneering British anthropologist, WWII hero, long-time director of the Sarawak Museum, conservationist, but also a prickly personality whose character invited controversy and divided opinions.

I was pleased to find that a series of documentaries that he co-produced in the 1950s, titled 'The Borneo Story', is available online. One of them, "Birds Nest Soup", which won a prize at the Cannes Film Festival, is embedded above.

These documentaries are a valuable glimpse into the state of Borneo in the postwar period, when it was still a tropical idyll, relatively untouched by large-scale plantation agriculture. Now, of course, birds nest soup is often commercially produced by inducing swifts to nest in abandoned buildings or purpose-built 'hangars', instead of being collected from the wild.

A 2006 BBC documentary, "The Barefoot Anthropologist" (YouTube), hosted by David Attenborough, gives a sense of the man and his exploits, including how he "restarted headhunting in Borneo". It's not all happy memories, though: one of the Australian soldiers under his command during the war describes how he wanted to shoot Harrisson, and is visibly agitated talking about him, half a century on!

More about his life can be read in the biography by Judith Heimann, The Most Offending Soul Alive.

Feeling the Burn

I love food, especially spicy food. The sting of chillies adds a good kick to any meal, and makes even a bowl of plain rice palatable. Why should it be so, though? After all, the pain we feel from eating chillies is very real - capsaicin, the active ingredient in chillies, directly stimulates pain receptors in our taste buds. It doesn't make sense that we should enjoy doing something that hurts us, and indeed other animals shy away from them. James Gorman at the New York Times writes about why we like to punish ourselves with chillies, and why these plants are so spicy to begin with.

Entomophagy for the Environment?

The Guardian reports on a new Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) report that suggests insect-eating as a way to mitigate the human demand for meat, especially in countries where insects are already consumed as part of local cuisines: "the FAO's priority will be to boost the eating of insects where this is already accepted but has been in decline due to western cultural influence."

It's easy to dismiss the idea as cranky or silly, but there is a valid point in there - people in industrialized nations already eat shrimp, which are quite similar. And it's not all about fried locust, either. Insects could be useful as feed for more conventional livestock, or turned into some kind of homogeneous patty, the better to disguise their origins.

My main bugbear about the article is that it talks about insects in the title but the picture shows scorpions on sticks. To be fair, the text of the article does say "insects and other creepy-crawlies," so it's not entirely wrong.