Toronto Star, Canada – 16 hours ago
Slinger
It’s called the edible-nest swiftlet because its nests are edible. This is the only reason anybody cares about it.
They are used to make soup.
The swiftlets are an Asian relative of our chimney swifts. Swiftlets, and swifts, are stunningly drab, grey and darker grey. None is as long as the thumb of an average National Basketball Association player. They’re usually seen a long ways up, flittering on narrow, sickle-shaped wings as they hoover in high-flying insects.
Bugs. That’s all they eat.
If they aren’t roosting or nesting, they’re airborne. They feed their fledglings on the wing. More than that, they mate on the wing. Apart from man, they are the only creatures capable of doing it. Unlike man, they do it on their own wings.
The edible-nest swiftlets that swarm from mountain caves 2,800 metres above sea level qualify for automatic membership in the Mile-High Club.
What distinguishes edible-nest swiftlets from their cousins is that the nests they build in the subterranean dark incorporate little by way of twigs or mud. What they’re made of pretty well exclusively is spit.
Their particular spit is goopy and dries to the consistency that elderly readers will be familiar with if they recall the brittle gunk caked around the mouths of paste jars when they were in elementary school.
Certain kids (the kind who were encouraged by their parents to run away and join a circus) enjoyed eating that gunk because, with any luck, some other kid watching this would throw up, so there’s not much about edible-nest swiftlets’ nests that should put off an adventurous eater, which you’re not if the idea of eating swiftlet spit, or that the spit is the end result of a digestive process fuelled by bugs and nothing but, bothers you.
The soup made from these nests is always described as “glutinous.” The next most frequent adjective is “tasteless.”
Yet the demand is such that, according to The Nation, a Bangkok newspaper, the Thai government has collected more than $9.7 million from nest-harvesting companies for concessions in the last four years. The black market is so intense that the swiftlets themselves hover near the edge of extinction.
A Thailand Research Fund report has identified corruption running seamlessly from poachers to government conservation agents to local politicians to, of course, Thailand being Thailand, the police. It’s one of the busiest arenas for money laundering in the country.
When we were there two weeks ago, Thai news organizations were attributing the murder of an administrative official on Koh Mak Island, one of 200 cave-riddled coastal islands where the swiftlets nest, to the trade.
The total number of similar deaths in recent years gets rounded off as “running into the hundreds.”
For soup. That tastes like flour-and-water paste. Made from bird spit.
Hong Kong is crazy for it, importing $25 million worth of nests a year. A kilogram of the finest kind goes for $2,000.
A bowl of it can set you back $100.
And you probably guessed why. It’s another one of nature’s sure-fire treatments for erectile dysfunction. At least certain men think it is.
They … uh-oh. Hold on a minute. It just occurred to me that the two stories I came back with from my Southeast Asia journeyings (Tuesday it was eating dogs in Vietnam) fall into the same category: masculine stimulants. And it also occurs to me that there might be something weird about this.
If it wasn’t a fluke, I hate to think what else is going on in my subconscious.
Because I, personally, don’t have any problems in that regard. Seriously. None at all. Considering my age.
