Eating Strange Animals in Vietnam
What follows are some tidbits and scattered anecdotes about things I’ve eaten while living abroad in Vietnam.
The strangest animal I’ve eaten in Vietnam is lizard. The second strangest food I’ve eaten in Vietnam is fresh pig’s blood soup.
I have never eaten dog. However, yes, that is a thing, and yes, I’ve seen it.
Anyway, lizard tastes kind of froggy, kind of chickeny. It’s weird. But I liked it.
The pig’s blood soup was too strange. But I liked it until my friend told me what I was eating.
We foreigners are too picky!
Locals will say, “What do you mean, you don’t like it? You don’t like food?”
Back in 2018, another friend tried to get me to eat fertilized duck egg. You heard me right. It comes with a surprise. That surprise is a duck fetus.
Now that I’m once in Vietnam once more, I’ve had plenty of opportunities to eat strange food. Naturally, I declined.
Now, my cup of tea may not be yours, but I’m the kind of guy who gets bothered by meat. Of course, the further removed it is from its living form, the more comfortable I am with it. This makes heavily processed meats such as Slim Jims a prime selection.
I once saw a guy near Bao Loc holding a trussed up chicken over a metal pot. While boiling it alive, he smiled and waved at me as I passed on my motorbike.
Another time, in Saigon, a peasant woman tried to sell me live snakes and scorpions. Toting them around the city in a giant laundry sack, she assured me that it would bring me strength. I later discovered that the strength comes from drowning the creatures in spirit alcohol.
And yes, some Vietnamese do eat dog. It’s actually really sad. In some towns, you see a lot of puppers wandering around. Not a lot of grown dogs. I used to wonder why, but I have since inferred that the reason is because they are getting eaten before they are fully matured. Dog meat is considered expensive here. However, from what I’ve seen, the upper class, which has been Westernized (for better or for worse), abhor this practice just as I do. So I think the question of dog meat depends on who you ask.
For a change of pace, this video features Vietnamese Buddhist monks (vegetarians). They play with dogs and eat vegetables.
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By the way, this article isn’t a soapbox on which I judge Vietnamese meat eating habits. I also find benign things strange, like how they eat their pizza, for example (that’s with ketchup and sugary cheese foam-sauce, served mostly to children at rich-bitch birthday parties. Someone please take these customers to New York!).
I’m just sharing my experiences and opinions with you. Take ’em or leave ’em, buster. Vietnam is my home away from home, and in spite of all our cultural differences, I love it here.
Anyway, here are some cool blue crabs I found at a street market in Hue, Vietnam:
And here are some chicken legs. I mean, pet birds:
Finally, here is a street seller with a bowl of plump, juicy frogs:
