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Food and wine

When things get ratty Or: what happens when you write a food column in the Year of the Rat

I know, I know. The Year of the Rat is associated with wealth and material prosperity; it’s supposed to be good for getting focused and organized, and for investments (although this Year of the Rat soothsayers are saying that we likely just won’t go into recession).

And people born in the Year of the Rat are charismatic, intelligent, practical, hard-working and aggressive. Leaders of a sort, if they play their cards right.

And I know that the rat in the Chinese zodiac carries all sorts of other positive attributes — forthrightness, discipline, meticulousness —and that we’re supposed to get out of our collective Westernized head space when we think about these things.

But I’m sorry. Every time I hear that it’s the Year of the Rat, coming soon to a lunar calendar near you, all I can picture is the hideous, fat black roof rat with its obscene, fleshy tail that used to run along the beam under our deck, its glinty little eyes scanning, scanning, scanning for sunflower seeds the birds spilled from the feeder.

Unlike my girlfriend, who suffered who knows how many mice scurrying across her wee nine-year-old self when she had to sleep on the floor of a house in Regina her family rented one night before the moving van arrived, I’ve never been too freaked out by rats.

But this one was a doozy. There was something about him — maybe the way he defied all manner of traps and bait — that spooked and impressed me at the same time. I mean, this was one smart rat who didn’t fall for stinky cheese or peanut butter, bait traps or humane traps. I think it was smoked salmon skin that was his final undoing, so you had to hand it to him; he was a pretty cool rat with selective good taste. Remy take note.

Up until then, I’d never given much thought to what rats eat exactly, nor to eating them myself. At least not until I ventured up into the northern nether-reaches of Thailand, which was serenely beautiful but realistically couldn’t have been all that serene given it was a refuge/staging area for Karen rebels who had fled Myanmar.

There, in the middle of the mountain trail leading up to a village on a large scruff of bare dirt, were two cheerful girls, maybe eight and ten, who were carefully washing and, with a large dull machete, diligently scraping the short fur from a very dead rat stiffened with rigor mortis.

I watched them for quite a while, scraping, scraping then rinsing that rat with their small hands in a bright turquoise plastic basin half filled with cool, clear water. They drew very little blood, given they were well practised, having already scraped clean three or four plump, glistening bluish-grey rat bodies that were piled in a heap. There were two more to go.

I suppose it wouldn’t be too bad eating rat meat, depending, of course, on what the rats themselves had eaten. Those jungle rats looked pretty healthy and given all the lush, fragrant flora around, they likely tasted quite delicious. Those two young girls certainly looked healthy.

Some people call the urban pigeons that accumulate in stinky, parasite-laden masses in city parks and plazas feathered rats, given their similarity in haunts and traits to the mammalian variety. I read once that before Ernest Hemingway earned his wealth and fame he survived in Paris by killing and eating pigeons. He said they weren’t too bad.

One small triangular shaped park not that far from Père-Lachaise Cemetery — which houses the bones of Jim Morrison, Edith Piaf and other assorted icons — offered particularly good hunting for nice, plump feathered rats (I only know it is triangular-shaped because I sat on a bench there and read the account about Hemingway).

In New Orleans and surrounding environs, they encourage locals to trap and eat nutrias, also known as nutra-rats; not to be confused with the prehistoric supra rat-like rodent, the   remains of which were recently found in Uruguay. It likely weighed a tonne when it roamed the Earth.

The nutria is a cross between a rodent and a beaver (think webbed feet, ratty face and long, pink scaly tail) that looks like a big fat wet rat if you ever see one in a southern swamp. This South American native was brought to North America for its fur and is now considered a real nuisance for all the water plants it munches on.

As for what rats eat before they are eaten, ask anyone who has had a rat problem and they’ll tell you it’s pretty well anything. Being the omnivorous creatures that they are with highly developed senses and a huge capability to climb, leap, gnaw, jump and burrow, they generally get into just about anything anywhere — grain, seeds, wild fruit, bugs, dog food, dead animals, edibles in compost heaps, groceries in your house and garbage, garbage, garbage. It all depends on where they live.

Robert Sullivan knows more about their eating habits of rats than most. He spent a couple of years studying the rats in an alley near Broadway and City Hall in New York City. The result is the can’t-put-it-down Rats , a bestseller that’s as much about New York as its most unwanted inhabitants.

“The diet of the city rat is garbage, the refuse of man,” writes Sullivan. “But which garbage? Which particular kind of refuse? And exactly how much trash does a rat eat?”

One rat trapper in Baltimore doing rat research long before Sullivan’s time made a list from his observations. Apparently the garbage-food rats most liked (in order of descending appeal) were scrambled eggs, macaroni and cheese, cooked corn kernels, cooked potatoes and cooked oatmeal. Hmmm, big carb hunters.

The food they least liked were raw beets, peaches, raw celery, cooked cauliflower, grapefruit and raw cauliflower. Sounds like a kid’s food pick and no-go lists to me.

After spending a whole summer tracking his alley rats at a discreet distance — Sullivan didn’t want to interfere with their behaviour — he concluded that the food rats scurrying around inside black plastic garbage bags loved most, fought over most was chicken pot pie. Ratatouille ‘s sophisticated Remy would be oh so disappointed.

 

Glenda Bartosh is an award-winning freelance writer who will sneak a peak at the Year of the Rat parade, and the neighbourhood rats, in Vancouver’s Chinatown February 10.