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"Whoever discovered balut stumbled onto the fact that food has changing excellences (taste, texture) as it evolves and develops. Thus between the egg and the full-grown duck, there are stages that bear exploring-and eating. And the Filipino has explored them and evolved the culture of balut."
Doreen Fernandez in "The World of Balut"
This essay illustrates how consumption of one particular food, fertilized duck eggs, can reveal the interplay between food, beliefs, culture and history. Called balut in the Philippines or hot vit lon in Vietnam, fertilized duck eggs are also familiar in the food customs of Chinese, Laotians, Cambodians and Thais. Socio-cultural factors, not just nutritional reasons dominate its consumption. Using historical and literary sources, as well as fieldwork data culled from 25 balut eaters, two balut distributors and a duck farmer as well, I will explore what it is about balut that makes eating it desirable. Why ingest something that may already have bones, feathers and a beak? For Filipino and other Asian Americans, there are alternative sources of protein, (which is not the case for many in the Philippines who do not have the luxury of choice).
"Eating is usually a more complicated function than just taking nourishment" wrote food scholar Kurt Lewin. The complexities involved in the eating of balut, or any other food for that matter, has since been explored by a number of folklorists and anthropologists. Food scholarship has ranged from food as a semiotic system (Theophano 1991; Douglas 1966 & 1972; Weismantel 1988), to how consumption is tied to psychological and economic factors (Lewin 1942; Richards 1932), to the way food defines ethnicity (Brown and Mussell 1984; Georges 1984; Kalcik 1984). However, much of the debate between food scholars is between the materialists, led by Marvin Harris and Marshall Sahlins, and symbolic theorists such as Mary Douglas and Claude Levi-Strauss. Harris agrees that food may have symbolic meaning, but before anything else, "food must nourish the collective stomach before it can feed the collective mind" and whatever foods are eaten, "are foods that have a more favorable balance of practical benefits over costs than foods that are avoided (bad to eat)" (Harris 1985:15). For Douglas, however, food embodies a code, and the messages in it can be seen...