The Bizarre Truth (10 page)

We set up some worktables, unpacked the coolers, and got to work. We chopped vegetables, blanched and shocked the live
lobsters, and extracted the giant conch meats out of their shells, which is no easy task. I had never seen a traditional conch harvester pull conch from its home, and let me tell you, it’s truly one of the world’s hardest bits of food prep. The shell is designed by nature to be impervious to intrusion and defy any attempt to crack it. The innards are coiled up inside the spiral caverns of the shell’s interior, with the animal’s long “tail” wrapping around the central column that the rest of the shell builds out from. Freeing the animal simply by pulling it out is a nonstarter—it’s coiled too tightly, with an enormous amount of suction holding the conch firmly in place. I don’t care if you’re built like a brick shithouse—you’re just not strong enough to pull it out. Sure, you can boil or brine the animal, pulling the meat out of the shell once it’s died and shrunken away. However, both of those methods would mean ruining the meat for the type of cooking that we wanted to do, or that anyone with any desire to taste really good food would want to attempt. Extracting the conch alive and whole is not only ideal but, quite frankly, mandatory. To do that, you must take a hammer or a small crowbar or pipe and knock away at the crown of the shell where the biggest spike protrudes out. You goal is to open up an airhole there and release the pressure inside the shell. Once you’ve done that, you look for the whitish muscle and push it forward with a screwdriver or other narrow implement.

We did this to eight, nine, ten of these animals and trimmed away some of the intestinal products and the protective pincer that the conch uses to eat, move, burrow, and protect itself. It turns out that you can eat every bit of the mollusk if you need to, but some of the conch parts are tastier and more appetizing than others. Of course, the connective muscles and gastrointestinal tract can be eaten or discarded, and the animal has a large, crystal-clear penis relative to its body size, very long and thin with a small bulb at the end. Tobago told me that he has actually witnessed conchs mating on the ocean floor. The male extends this long, thin, transparent member, which looks like a tentacle from a 1950s sci-fi movie
creature, and inserts it into the female from as far away as several feet. It’s an odd coupling, but everybody in the conch biz swears it happens that way. Tobago and I ate a few conch penises together and had a few laughs as he tried to explain the whole conch mating ritual. I’m not proud of it, but if an animal has a penis, at some point I have put it in my mouth. It’s just the nature of my job.

My favorite part of the conch is the giant, hockey puck—like disc of sweet, white conch meat that comprises the major muscle of the animal. Its texture is like a cross between abalone and raw steak, firm and yielding. The flavor rivals that of the sweetest hand-collected diver scallops you’ve ever tasted: saline, bright, and sugary sweet. In fact, most parts of the muscle you can just bite through without much work; it yields to the teeth and is insanely palatable.

I’ve eaten conch many times, sometimes frozen or canned, many times fresh, but never still wiggling and winking as it came out of the shell. That day on No Man’s Land we feasted on the best-tasting conch I have ever had, and not just because it had been hand collected in cold, deep water, but also because it was so insanely fresh. That made our meal sweeter and more vibrant than anything that I could have hoped for. It was a truly sublime eating experience.

As the sun was setting, we pigged out on the kind of meal that you try to re-create for the rest of your life. A meal that makes all the other beachfront cookouts pale in comparison; a meal you would prefer to forget because it makes all the subsequent meals an emptier experience. Frothy, Skinny, and Adrian made a curry stew of fresh lobster and local vegetables collected at the market that morning, including cocoa, dasheen root, peppers, onions, sweet potatoes, and tomatoes. We made an incredible salad from some wild sea grapes I found. These are a member of the seaweed family whose little bulbous clusters coming off a central stem have inspired the locals to refer to them as sea grapes. We took wild limes, lemon, and fresh grated coconut and made a lobster
ceviche, complete with the tomatoes and onions that we’d brought along. We ate it all with our conch, sitting in the sand on this uninhabited island with the sun setting in the background, the wind long since died down, and the seas as smooth as glass.

That part of the world has a confluence of so many cultures. You have the Creole, the African cultures mixed with Spanish, Dutch, and Indian influence, which makes Trinidad and Tobago’s food scene a vibrant hodgepodge of international flavors on a par with countries like Singapore—a place everyone thinks of when the subject of a cultural culinary melting pot comes up. The meal had a little bit of all of those worlds thrown into the pot, and none of us wanted the day to end.

The poignancy of the evening was hammered home when it came time to say good-bye. Elvis was nuzzling the British lady in the back of the boat, and Frothy and Adrian and Skinny were stuffed to the gills, slapping one another on the back. Tobago was walking along the beach, not overly sad, mostly wistful. The afternoon had focused me around the fact that he was the last of his kind, but I didn’t want to fetishize him. I felt bad that I had asked him so pointedly about it earlier on his boat; it seemed to be one of those issues he’d pushed to the back of his mind, and I had brought it front and center—perhaps insensitively? Tobago came walking back down the shore and seemed to read my mind. I began to apologize, stumbling over my words, and he stopped me, smiled his big toothy grin, and began barking orders at Elvis. We were all good.

The world is changing, and often I wish we could bring back the slower ways of doing things. There was a simpler time once, when diving for plentiful conch was a safe and economically viable occupation. It’s not so easy to turn back the clock, and I am not sure we would want to. The world advances, and there is an ebb and flow of civilization that plays an important role in our historical and cultural development. Without internal-combustion engines there would be no rocket ships to the moon. However—and I don’t think that you can lambaste and vilify someone for saying this—in
an era when we are praising and even lionizing the slow-food movement, the concept of sustainability, and the notion of locavorism, we need to at the very least preserve the legacy of these people in a meaningful way so that future generations can get an accurate sense of what the world used to be like. The United States’ high-end food culture is obsessed with sustainability, farm-to-table eating, snout-to-tail eating, and eating as close to nature as you can. I hope that some of that trickles down from the awareness of the privileged few to all Americans. Currently, you see a lot more of that kind of talk in the Wednesday Food Section of the
New York Times
than in the local mechanic’s shop, with guys standing around the soda machine, wiping oil from their hands, and swapping stories about the best farmer’s market to get heirloom dried beans from.

It’s hard not to get emotional about spending the day on the water with the very last person in the world who harvests conch the old-fashioned way, one at a time with his own two hands. And the lessons to be taught about hard work and our rapidly diminishing capacity to save our planet from environmental disaster are best learned not from the nightly news but from men like Tobago Cox.

t might not seem like it at first glance, but Mexico is one of the most diverse countries in the world, ethnically, geographically, politically, and culturally. Every time I visit, I marvel at the abundance of things to do and how amazingly different one day can be from another. Americans love heading to Cabo, Mazatlán, or Cozumel, but my favorite destination has to be the country’s southernmost state, Oaxaca. I’m sure you’ve heard of Acapulco, the region’s most bustling beach town, overdeveloped in the extreme and filled with more ethnocentrist globe-trotting tourists than just about any location on the planet. But beyond that, Oaxaca offers the best of everything: gorgeous sand beaches, a phenomenally complex and varied food scene, and that easygoing vibe (in most towns) that nobody I know can ever seem to get enough of.

But the area has so much more to offer than sunbathing, Jimmy Buffet sing-alongs by the pool, and umbrella drinks filled with cheap tequila. The fish and sea life are plentiful, especially when it comes to deep-sea, sport, and hand-line or net fishing. With this readily accessible, renewable food source, it’s not surprising that the locals made the most of it. The Pacific coastline of the state of Oaxaca is lined from top to bottom with fishing villages, both large and small, some thriving, some dying, and some struggling to survive the onslaught of the developers’ bulldozers.

Take the city of Huatulco, which seemed to spring up almost overnight, but really has grown over the past three or four decades
from a lonely little beach, with some fun rock outcroppings surrounding a nice deep-water harbor, into a numbingly throbbing hotel zone. Back in the day, this little beach town was wallowing in huge puddles of financial success because of the fishing. The sheer abundance of seafood that is available here is staggering: mollusks, abalone, conch and clams, urchins, squid, fin fish, lobsters and all other manner of crustaceans—you can find it all in the cool, deep waters off Huatulco. These days, tourism drives the economy. Projections are that the once-tiny fishing town will support some 20,000 hotel rooms by 2020. In 2008, nearly 300,000 visitors traveled to Huatulco. Within twenty years, they expect two million.

I spent some time in Huatulco a few years back, staying overnight in one of those horrific all-inclusive resorts on the beachfront, a place seemingly carved right out of a Hieronymus Bosch painting of Dante’s Inferno. The place was filled with lobster-colored, margarita-scented tourists, most of whom never left the hotel compound. Why should you? You’d miss all the free booze, the pool volleyball with the bosomy bikini-ed staff, the free chips and salsa—and God forbid you weren’t first in line for the massive buffet-style meals that made airplane food seem inspired.

Most vacationers talk a big game, boasting that they want to dive into another culture face-first, but they never will. My fellow guests were shocked as they watched me journey out in the morning to discover the real Huatulco. These are the folks who fear getting robbed or acquiring a serious case of Montezuma’s revenge at every turn; these are the people who think that everyone in the city they live in leads a monastic existence predicated on a need to walk the earth performing good deeds at every turn. They also think that all indigenous peoples around the world are hustlers and grifters, drug dealers and terrorists, every one of whom is hell-bent on separating them from their wallets. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: The best experiences you will ever have as a traveler require getting off your ass and spending quality time
with real people in real towns, cities, and villages. I prefer to do it by experiencing food and sharing culture.

Anyway, I’ll get off my soapbox, but frankly people become so afraid of venturing into the unknown that they often miss what is right in front of their faces. One of the best meals I ate in Mexico on that trip came from the water right outside the hotel. I’d been up in my room, taking in the sunset from my balcony, trying to figure out what to do for dinner and where I could go to eat that wasn’t in or near my hotel, when I noticed four or five kids diving off the rocks into the water. Each time they came out of the ocean, they dumped handfuls of shellfish into pails, which I assumed they would later hawk to local restaurants. I ran right down to the beach as fast as I could, asking if they had a knife or some sort of tool to open the shells. They did, and it turned out that not only were they trying to collect some seafood to haul to the back doors of a few local kitchens, but they would also hawk their wares on the beach to anyone willing to buy a plate. I ate a platter of fresh shellfish, one at a time, shucked by a nine-year-old kid right there on the beach. There was an assortment of eight or nine different pieces machine-gunned at me like a little mini raw bar selection on automatic fire. I’ve seen the same plate for hundreds of dollars in swanky Tokyo restaurants—orange and red Pacific clams, abalone, small whelks, oysters, scallops, all fresh from the sea. The big difference with this meal was that it cost about four bucks and I shopped for it from my balcony window.

While I love the Pacific shellfish, Huatulco is actually best known for a different sort of sea creature. The area surrounding the town’s hotel zone, technically called Los Bahias de Huatulco, is made up of about nine bays that stretch for twenty miles along southern Mexico’s Pacific shore. Much of the coastline is extremely rocky, with good currents and clean waters, making it the perfect breeding grounds for octopus. I love hunting and gathering food, so naturally I wanted to fish for octopus the old-fashioned way. Enter Francisco Rios Ramirez, an octopus diver with thirty years’
experience under his belt. I’m beginning to think the fountain of youth is located in the long-lost city of Atlantis—either that or diving is great for your skin, since Tobago Cox and Francisco are two of the most fit and youthful-looking guys I’ve met in a long time. Francisco has a trim waistline, maybe thirty-four inches, but the guy weighs more than I do. He’s solid muscle, with a huge chest and the widest shoulders I have seen on anyone his size. If I hadn’t known better, I would have pegged him as an NFL linebacker, albeit a very short one. We met up with him at the docks in the sleepy port of Santa Cruz. We shared a coffee and a roll, got our gear together, and, under a cloudless sky, boarded his little boat, a small skiff with an ancient outboard motor, and headed out toward our first stop, Tagolunda Bay, which incidentally means “beautiful woman” in Zapotec, one of the area’s indigenous languages.