Nang gets up early every morning and rushes to the nearby market. She likes to be first in line for the catch of the day and carefully picks out all her produce. Freshness is paramount, so some items on her shopping list must be living and breathing.
“The only way to animate the art of cooking is to prepare it while the food is still alive,” she said.
The 36-year-old owns a small Isan restaurant in an isolated part of Samut Prakan, where she cooks food in a style passed down from generation to generation.
Her father is a typical Isan farmer and passionate about cooking. He never had any culinary training or ran a restaurant of his own, but he passed on the legacy of Isan cuisine to Nang. As the only girl of seven siblings, she automatically became the cook of the house.
What makes some of her specialities distinctive is that the dishes are fresh and full of life. And when Nang says her food is full of life, she means it literally.
It just slides down: Above, fresh water eels on sale in a market, which are the main ingredient in a popular dish enjoyed by the people of Isan, left.
STRAIGHT TO THE POT
One of the most famous dishes at Nang’s Isan restaurant is pla lai tom pret, which she makes once a week in a big pot. Pla lai tom pret is a spicy eel soup. It tastes similar to the more common tom saep soup and is packed with fresh herbs and chilli.
Pla lai means “eel” in Thai, tom means “boiled” and the word pret means “hungry ghost”.
What makes pla lai tom pret unique is the way it is cooked. Live eels are placed in a pot and submerged in water. The cook then slowly turns up the heat to boiling point.
As the temperature climbs, the eels attempt to escape the pot by raising their heads above the surface of the bubbling water. This struggle to the death gave rise to the name of the dish, since people say the eels resemble hungry ghosts, reaching their arms up to beg for food.
Once the eels are dead, Nang takes them out of the water and cleans off their scales. She then chops them up and throws them back into the soup. The rest of the ingredients are quickly added and the soup is served up, piping hot.
“The eel meat is soft and tastes very sweet,” said Nang, who is proud of her delicacy.
Mr Chob is one of the customers who orders pla lai tom pret as part of a spicy meal. He told Spectrum that the soup is the perfect partner to Thai whisky or beer.
“I personally don’t care how the food is prepared. As long as it is good, I will eat it,” said Mr Chob, who is half drunk as he explains how much he enjoys his food. He mentions another favourite among drinkers, which is goong ten.
Goong ten means “dancing shrimp”. The dish is very simple to make since it only requires a few ingredients. Baby shrimps are the key component. The tiny creatures are scooped out of the water and placed in a bowl, with a squeeze of lime juice and dusting of chilli. The sour and spicy dressing prompts the shrimp to try and jump out of the bowl. So the cook covers the dish with a lid and it’s ready to serve.
“Interacting with the food is fun,” Mr Chob said. “The best feeling is when the shrimps are jumping in my mouth and I chew them to death,” he told Spectrum as he took another sip of lao khao, or rice whisky.
An acquired taste: ‘Pla lai tom pret’ is a spicy eel soup where the eels are boiled alive and resemble ‘hungry ghosts’ trying to escape the pot.
A PAINFUL WAY TO DIE
These are not the only Thai dishes that raise questions over animal cruelty. Online food blogs reveal a number of “delicacies” with a barbaric twist.
Gai krati, or “chicken coconut”, is one such example. To make the dish, a chicken is buried alive up to its neck. Confined to its dusty trap, with only its head poking out of the soil, the bird is fed on a diet of pure coconut milk for two to three weeks.
Then, when the time is right, the chicken is dug out and slaughtered. The meat is said to be tender and aromatic, due to the amount of coconut milk it consumes during its final weeks.
Gaeng luk krok, also known as gaeng luk grog, literally means “dead baby soup”. This dish is quicker to make than gai krati, but arguably just as cruel. The soupy dish has two main ingredients — baby fish, usually snakeheads, and morning glory.
To make the dish, a school of live baby snakeheads is thrown into a pot filled with room temperature water. The pot is put on the stove and the fish frantically try to escape the rising heat. The cook, meanwhile, cuts up the morning glory stalks and throws them into the mix.
The baby fish naturally gravitate to the coolest place in the pot, which is inside the hollow stalks of the morning glory. It doesn’t take long for the vegetables to heat up too, so the fish die encased in the morning glory. The soup is seasoned and it’s ready for eating.
Baby chicks are the chief ingredient in gai grabok, or “bamboo chicken”. To prepare the dish a small chick is trapped inside a hollow piece of bamboo.
The chick is fed and grows within the confines of its closed environment. It gets bigger, but develops into a long shape with soft bones, due to a lack of exercise. When the chicken is old enough, it is released from the bamboo and slaughtered. Those who have tried the dish say you can eat the whole chicken since its bones are so soft.
Nang told Spectrum she has heard of the chicken dishes, but has never tried them or seen them cooked. She added that she disagrees with unnecessarily inhumane ways of killing animals for food.
However, she argued that cooking fish alive is no different to widely practised methods of preparing seafood such as crab.
“The steamed crab that we eat from restaurants is cooked alive and some saltwater fish are taken right from the tank and put straight into the wok. So what is wrong with it?” Nang asked.
No appetite: ML Sirichalerm Svasti, alias Chef McDang, says cruel dishes are just gimmicks or the work of lazy chefs.
ANYTHING WITH CLAWS
ML Sirichalerm Svasti, or Chef McDang, is a celebrity cook and Thai food expert. He wrote the book The Principles of Thai Cookery and has his own TV programme called The McDang Show.
Chef McDang said cruel Thai dishes were invented as gimmicks and have no special nutritional value.
“We might be in the land of plenty, but in the old days some parts of Thailand were not yet civilised, so people would eat anything with claws or that walked,” Chef McDang explained.
He believes that a number of cruel dishes came about because people were lazy, citing pla lai tom pret as a prime example. The idea of just throwing everything into a pot appealed to those who couldn’t be bothered to put effort into preparing their food, Chef McDang said.
“It is just a cooking technique that shortens the time it takes to prepare the dish,” he said. “People tried to make it interesting by giving it a gimmicky name, but it basically came about because of lazy cooks and because of people who lacked a choice of protein to eat.
“These cooking techniques are dying out and some have already stopped completely. Not many people carry out this type of cooking any more.”
According to folklore beliefs associated with Chinese and other traditional forms of medicine, eating creatures that experience pain before death brings health benefits.
Some proponents say the toxins produced by a suffering animal make it taste better, or can cure human illness.
Chef McDang rejects these claims as completely untrue, but he does think that cooking seafood alive is a different matter.
“Steamed crab, prawn and fish tastes best when cooked alive. The meat is much more delicious and sweet,” he said.
Thon Thamrongnawasawat, a lecturer from the department of marine science at Kasetsart University said that sea creatures such as fish, crabs, prawns and other shellfish feel pain, just like all animals.
Creatures that are tortured at the end of their lives have a physical response to pain. For example, scientists have found that lobsters produce the stress hormone cortisol as they are boiled alive.
But Mr Thon said it is safer for humans to cook seafood alive in order to maintain freshness. Shellfish in particular poses a risk of food poisoning.
Harmful bacteria, which is naturally present in the flesh of shellfish, multiplies quickly after the creature dies, so cooking it alive offers the best chance at minimising exposure to the bacteria.
“It may sound cruel to steam crabs alive, but these animals can be contaminated with bacteria if they are not prepared in this way,” he said.
“The quality and flavour of meat also reduces if the animals die too long before cooking,” he added.
The crustacean quickstep: A dish known as ‘goong ten’, or dancing shrimps, which involves live shrimps mixed with some lime juice and chilli.
LOOKING THE OTHER WAY
While cruel cooking methods outrage some consumers, many food lovers avoid worrying about what happens to their food before it gets to the plate.
Nang’s customer, Mr Chob, says he would rather ignore the process.
“I try not to think of how it is done,” Mr Chob said. “I just order the food, wait until it arrives on the table and enjoy it.”
Chef McDang acknowledged that the methods used to cook seafood are cruel, but said the flavour and quality of the resulting dishes was too good to pass up.
“Is it a sin? I would not say that it isn’t,” Chef McDang said. “I don’t normally pick which one I want from the tank when I go to a seafood restaurant. I just tell them to bring it.”
Mr Thon said that countries across the world endorse cruel techniques for cooking seafood. “But the whole world eats it and it seems acceptable to the majority,” he said.
“We shouldn’t forget that all of the meat we consume is from an animal that has been killed. No matter how we cook the animals, they are killed for food anyway.”
Chef McDang adds that many of the most inhumane foods are steeped in the cultural values of where they originate, such as foie gras, caviar or shark’s fin soup. These foods remain popular despite the element of cruelty. However, such foods are becoming less socially acceptable. For example, five-star hotels throughout the world have joined forces to ban shark’s fin soup.
The celebrity chef said Thailand is yet to introduce laws to stop cruelty to animals used for food, aside from those species that are officially “protected”. He admitted the country should have better regulations on the matter.
“We should not be allowed to eat some animals, such as whales and sharks. There were fewer people in the old days, living in small communities, so local people were creative in what they cooked,” Chef McDang said. “These days the scale of populations is completely different. If we keep doing what we did in the past, many animals will become extinct.” n