Pixiq

Warning! Do NOT scroll down to the lower images if you have a delicate stomach!

I just returned from China, where one of my more memorable culinary experiences was in Nanjing. Our host ordered a local speciality, an egg which had been allowed to go half-term before being boiled. Ah-hah, think about it. Actually, I’d come across this before, most notably in the Philippines, where both origin and result are duck, they’re called balut, and are immensely popular, mainly among men (something to do with its support functions for bodily performance).

So, here we go again, I thought. I’m game for this kind of thing, because strange foods are a hobby of mine. This is fortunate if you travel to some of the places I get to, where it’s better not to be either squeamish or conservative. In fact, taking this hobby to a natural conclusion, I did a book a number of years ago with a friend, American writer Jerry Hopkins, called ...... Strange Foods.

But back to the Nanjing version of balut, which I think was chicken rather than duck. Eating procedure is to make a little hole and slurp out the liquid. Open a bit more and suck out the embryo (don’t worry, beak and head are still soft, so not at all scratchy on the throat). Then off with the entire shell and eat the rest, apart from a solid, hardly chewable bit that I couldn’t quite get an ID on. Tasting notes: delicious, but with more textural variety than most people would prefer. This is by no means universally popular in China, by the way, but our Nanjing host remarked: “Well, you like egg? And you like chicken? Here you get them both in one!”

Where am I going with this, you may wonder. Why is it here, other than to upset some people? It goes back to the book, which demanded a lot of photography of stuff that many would rather not think about, let alone see. Now, food photography has its own set of techniques and principles, all designed to enhance the appetizing appearance of dishes, so that the reader wants to eat them. They are beautification techniques of one sort, and involve lighting, texture and viewpoint. Food photography also goes through fashions, from clear and crisp, for example, to selective focus.

In my case, this was an interesting challenge, but given that even a Big Mac or a KFC thingy can be made to look edible, why not the more challenging chicken embryos, and other things on my shotlist? So, on to the studio and the full lighting procedure. I think I’d better leave the balut shot to the very end so that you don’t have to scroll that far, as it’s more or less as bad as you might imagine — a failure of a photograph, in one sense — and start with some others. Here we go...

There is actually a serious point to this, which is about making things look good. This is a core skill in photography, and something I write about in my new book The Photographer’s Mind. Most photographers do it most of the time, and I think for a lot of people it goes unquestioned. You arrive at a spectacular landscape location and you have a day or two to work at it. The usual assumption is that you’ll wait for the light and the time of day, and find a harmonious composition from a researched viewpoint. Success is awarded according to how well you do this. But it’s not the only approach. Look at the work of Robert Adams. 

Anyway, here's the balut.....

By the way, at the end of the book, Jerry and I had sampled some pretty unusual things, to the point where we had become immune to the usual yuck and ugh factor. More to the point, no one in the places where we ate the various foods that we sampled — and I’m sparing you the gooey ones — thought they were at all strange. Far from it. So what’s strange, what’s disgusting? At the end, Jerry and I sat one evening in a cocktail bar in Bangkok. I asked him, really, what was the strangest food he could think of after all of this. He thought about it, and said, “A peanut butter and jelly sandwich.” As a Brit, I could only agree; it’s quite weird as a concept. But he’s the American!