Photo Essay: Interesting Culinary Treats in The Mekong Delta

I’ve always had a weird fascination with the meat and seafood section in my local grocery store. I could spend hours looking at cuts of fresh meat and recently caught seafood on ice. I often get sidetracked and end up forgetting what I was looking for in the first place. For anyone with a similar strange interest, a Mekong Delta market is a dream come true. Take a stroll through the market in a Mekong town and you’ll come face to face with some of the strangest and freshest seafood in the world, and I use the term seafood loosely. Riverfood?
Vietnamese cuisine is known for the eclectic variety of animals used in it’s dishes. It’s normal in certain areas to come across restaurants serving snake, cat, rat, dog, lizard, and all manners of fish and amphibians. Rough periods in the past have led rural villagers to become uniquely resourceful with their meal choices. If you’ve ever tasted Vietnamese cooking, then you know that they also possess the skill to make these strange selections taste delicious.
On a recent trip in the Mekong Delta, I arrived late in the morning to a local market to do a little window shopping. The market was already bustling with activity when I ventured into its labyrinthine alleyways. I strolled around the market, largely ignored by the local shopkeepers and villagers haggling. I ignored the craft and textile areas and searched in vain for the meat and seafood section. After wandering about for an hour, I finally found what I was looking for in a large area of stands located alongside a pier next to the river. Before me was a cornucopia of the freshest ingredients money could buy, some of the more interesting living specimens I'd ever come across.
The was stand after stand of oddly shaped, unrecognizable mollusks, crabs, fish, eels, snakes, and even the occasional chicken and pig. Most of the animals were still alive: frogs tied together, snakes in buckets, fish in coolers. The pig had seen better days, though.
Occasionally I stopped to peruse the stands holding the more interesting and livelier looking specimens. I tried to engage the shopkeepers in some friendly banter, but they weren’t too keen on wasting time with a foreigner who didn’t appear to appreciate their culinary treats. A woman whose shop featured a large amount of living crabs in a bucket didn’t even chuckle when I asked her if I could purchase a clichéd metaphor. When I pretended to be interested in buying some dinner, salesmen thrust fish innards and live snakes in my face to entice me, in much the same way a shopkeeper would a t-shirt or a local craft. It was a little early in the morning to come face to face with live, wriggling swamp creatures.
After a lot of window shopping, I finally won over a few local entrepreneurs when I alerted them that their fish were escaping. The fish appeared to be a species of mud skippers. They had a remarkable ability to survive outside of water. Stored in crowded buckets or on large, flat silver trays, every now and then one would squiggle or hop its way into the middle of the path, a charming but ultimately futile escape attempt. The women laughed as I tried to frantically mime to them that their products were on the lam. Apparently they were well aware, but they greatly appreciated the gesture and spontaneous game of charades that broke out.
One of the women spoke rudimentary English and we made polite conversation. I joked with her about obtaining some free samples and recipes for snake, and she tried to explain the differences between the local shellfish. Unfortunately, after a bout the night before with the local moonshine, my stomach was in no shape for experimenting with the more adventurous local cuisine. The memory of the last time I tried snake didn’t help either. I retired from the market after promising my new friends that (un)fortunately, I’d have to wait until next time to indulge.