Believe it or not, there are culinary cultures that prize bats as food. But there are also many reasons others don’t include the creepy night-flyers in their traditional menus. Would you try Bat Curry or Bat Soup, even if it was offered by a trusted friend?
A giant fruit bat, harvested from an Asian forest, destined for the stew pot…
Not as rare as you thought…
You may recall that pandemic investigators, early in the COVID Crisis, thought that bats might have been a vector for infection of humans. Not only did they suspect bats of transferring the virus to animals, which were in turn eaten by humans. They also proposed a direct link, via the Chinese delicacy Bat Soup. Bats have been consumed since ancient times across the Asia-Pacific realm.
But Wikipedia also notes: “Bats [are also] eaten by people in some areas of North America, Asia, Africa, Pacific Rim countries, and some other cultures, including the United States, Vietnam, the Seychelles, the Philippines, Indonesia, Palau, Thailand, and Guam. Half the megabat (fruit bat) species are hunted for food, but only eight percent of the insectivorous bat species are. In Guam, Mariana fruit bats (Pteropus mariannus) are considered a delicacy.”
What parts do they eat?
The 1999 version of The Oxford Companion to Food says the flavor of fruit bats is similar to chicken. Furthermore, they are hailed as, “clean animals living exclusively on fruit.” Bats are known to be prepared in a variety of ways, including grilled, barbecued, deep fried, cooked in stews and soups, and in stir frys.
Also like chickens, most cuisines that feature them behead and gut bats before cooking them. They usually remove the wings, but don’t necessarily remove the legs.
Where can you get bats?
It’s not recommended you go out looking for local bats to eat anywhere in the Western Hemisphere. Fruit bats, which are known to be safe to eat when harvested from the unpolluted tropical wilder-ness, are not native to our part of the world. And the bats we do have are dangerously prone to carrying viruses and other infectious agents. On top of that, it’s illegal to import bats into North America – no matter how clean they may be – and most of our native bats are protected species.
So, if you want to sample bat cuisine, you’ll have to go where the edible bats live, and the locals do eat them.
My take
I might try a bat dish if I ever land in a place where bats are commonly eaten. But I still carry a lot of emotional and social conditioning to fear and distrust bats. I wouldn’t want the bat component in the dish to be identifiable as such. I’ll have the curry, please…
My question to you:
Would you join me for dinner at the bat restaurant?
Muse on that…
~ Maggie J.