Word: pangolins
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...normally feeds his family of four by tramping from village to village buying vegetables from farmers and then reselling them to dealers, a practice that nets him about $40 in a good month. Today, if he's lucky, he will earn twice that in a few hours. "Pangolin are usually asleep in their nests at this time of day," he says, squatting down in front of a rabbit-hole-sized opening in a low embankment. After piling dried leaves and twigs in front of the burrow, he digs out a box of matches and sets the kindling alight, producing...
...Part of the answer can be found in the Herbal Encyclopedia, a dictionary of traditional Chinese medicine compiled some four centuries ago that lists 461 animals with organs that purportedly have curative powers. They include the rapidly vanishing tiger and the unfortunate pangolin. According to the dictionary, pangolin scales can be "used to cure tumefaction [swelling], promote blood circulation and help breast-feeding mothers produce milk." If he wanted a more up-to-date answer, Jema'ah could also have asked Wei Hong, a Guangdong native in his mid-30s who developed a taste for pangolin meat when his father...
...transformed Singapore into an Asian powerhouse. Yet the island nation is also notorious for a less reputable trade. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has slapped a total ban on wildlife imports from Singapore because of its refusal to obey international protections for rare animals. A typical victim: the pangolin, a cute-as-a-button mammal, rather like an anteater, that is on the endangered list in Malaysia, Indonesia and Thailand but has been winding up in American-made handbags and cowboy boots. The illicit traffic is covered up with sketchy documents that omit the country of origin...
...turns out that few people actually enjoy the taste of pangolin?a scaly anteater whose flesh is a blend of gristle and rubber. The same goes for the nocturnal civet, which has a gamy aftertaste that even the thickest brown sauce can't mask. And who really enjoys camel hump, which tastes just as you'd expect a blubbery lump to taste? But flavor isn't what really matters to many of the diners tucking into China's wildlife menagerie. "Businessmen come here to prove their wealth," says George Ng, a Shanghai-based restaurateur who specialized in cobra and other...
...Today, even neophyte diners know not to chow on pangolin in the summer, as its flesh reputedly warms the blood. Toad, however, is regarded as a perfect June-August nosh, because each bite is believed to cool the body, like a gastronomic air-conditioner. Deer tendons braised with turnip are supposed to enhance a woman's beauty; barking deer is said to cure hangovers, and a sizeable wild deer's penis reputedly does wonders for the underwhelming man. But the most fashionable?and expensive?morsel today is a strip of giant-salamander skin, the reddish tinge of which exactly matches...