Sep 9, 2003 4 min read

I like to know what I’m eating. The first visit I ever made to a Chinese restaurant, I told my companion not to inform me of the contents of the food until after I had eaten it.

Not that I was objecting to Chinese cooking. It’s just that even in my mid-20s I liked plain old home cooking that consisted of meat, potatoes and only a certain few vegetables. I did not like anything that started in the sea. I wasn’t crazy about things that had a lot of seasoning other than salt. And if it looked like it could be cooked for another hour or two, forget it – it wasn’t going into my mouth.

Things have changed some, although not a lot, in the decades since that first encounter with food other than plain. I still don’t care for things like scallops or shrimp, although I will eat a nice, mild piece of fish and my palate loves lobster and rainbow trout.

I season my foods with all kinds of stuff and enjoy nearly all of the dishes I find in Chinese, Mexican, Italian (and I even ate Thai in Toronto once) cuisines.

But when a young friend offered me a piece of exotic meat jerky, I balked.

Why?

It was elephant jerky.

Yes, that’s correct. Elephant. Meat from an enormous, ponderous pachyderm.

He brought it back from a special trip to Africa. I had never heard of anyone jerking an Elephant, although I know from reading a number of books on Africa and big game hunting there, that hunters would many times give the meat of a kill to the local people. I was always curious what elephant tasted like but I never thought I’d get to find out firsthand. Or, maybe I should say I was safe because the chances of someone serving elephant on a local restaurant menu or me getting to Africa to sample it firsthand were about as great as me finding out I just inherited a major fortune from a long lost relative. In other words, slim to none.

My lovely wife was visiting at his house where she was invited to try the stuff. Knowing my fascination with strange things, he gave her a small piece for me. Now usually when my wife visits someone and they offer her refreshments, it’s pie, cake or cookies. And if there are any extras that make it home to me, well, I gobble them down.

When my wife, later that day, told me about the elephant jerky, she mentioned she had some for me. But somehow, even though she had it in her lap in the car, she lost it.

Oh. Tooooooo baaaaaadd, I thought.

Dodged that bullet.

Yet, my wife constantly loses things. Her wallet, her purse, her car keys, and, inevitably sometime after they go missing she finds them.

Guess what? She found the elephant jerky.

I came home from work to find a small plastic bag lying on my desk. Inside was what looked like something you’d see lying alongside the road that had been there for a long, long, long time. It was grisly. It reminded me of parts of the Egyptian mummies I saw as a child at the Carnegie Museum. Those things are thousands of year old and this thing looked considerably older.

At first I was baffled. I had forgotten about the jerky and was trying to decipher why my wife would put something like this in a plastic bag and leave it on my desk. She only puts things there she wants me to see. I could have asked her but she was gone, visiting a sick friend in the hospital.

Memory kicked in and I realized what it was.

Uh oh, I thought. Now I have to put up or shut up.

I closed my eyes, opened my mouth and popped it in. At first, there was no real taste. I tried chewing it. I have never worked on anything so tough in all my life. I could barely make an indent with my teeth. But I tried again.

Frankly, the taste was rather mild. It wasn’t very salty, either. If that’s what an elephant tastes like, bring on some more, I thought.

Right. My young friend might be able to bring home some jerky from the Dark Continent. It’s very unlikely he’ll ever be able to bring home an elephant’s hindquarter.

But then there’s that old saying, “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.’

I hope he isn’t planning any more trips in the next 20 or 30 years. I don’t think my digestion could take it. Have a good day.

Jim Pletcher is the Herald-Standard’s business editor. E-mail: jpletcher@heraldstandard.com.