Did you know that …

The balut to a Filipino is best served when it is seventeen days old? It is eaten as just one of the stages from egg to duck.

Balut, the fertilized duck’s egg generally believed to be an aphrodisiac or at least an aid to virility, is familiar to Chinese, Vietnamese, and Filipinos, and perhaps to other Southeast Asians. It is eaten as just one of the stages from egg to duck, with its own special taste and excellence. For Westerners to understand and to eat it, however, a cultural leap is required. To some foreigners, they think we are insane. Others are adventurous enough to try it. The prime balut to a Filipino is seventeen days old, with the embryo enveloped in a white membrane (balut sa puti), very soft and tender, with no feathers of beak visible yet. The Vietnamese prefer their balut much older- nineteen to twenty days old, and therefore much further along the line of development towards the fowl. A balut-maker has said that his very best customers, his suki, who buy regularly, are given the best 16- or 17-day-old eggs. The eggs that he considers overgrown, at nineteen days, he sells to vendors in bus or train terminals, who sell to customers whom they will probably never see again. A rip-off if you come to think of it. The suki relationship, a bond central to Philippine commerce, is thus not developed in such a case, and not violated.

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Balut (Or "Balot") is one of the Philippines' real native culinary delicacy that is sold every where in the streets. It is simply a duck egg cooked by boiling it for not less than 20 minutes. What makes balot special is that it is not simply an egg with the white and the yoke. It actually has a half-incubated chick inside it.

Balot is akin to an aprodesiac; why else would it be sold at night time by wandering salesmen shouting "BA - LUUT!" Of course eggs have that obvious fertility symbolic connection but balut is also considered to be strengthening - providing a burst of protein to replenish lost energy after an amorous encounter... The Filipino equivalent to post loving pizza.

Another cultural context in which Balut is eaten is during the drinking session. It is a form of "pulutan" - food eaten when drinking alcohol. Recent studies by scientists confirm the importance of eating high protein foods when drinking alcohol as opposed to sugary or high carbohydrate foods. The visual grossness of Balut might also be stimulating to people lost in a beer haze. Certainly many foreigners need to be in this state before they feel ready to partake of this particular Filipino delicacy.

Which brings me to my next point. Tourist baiting. Filipinos love the shock value of Balot. They take every opportunity to dare foreigners to eat it and consume it teasingly in their presence. Calling this culinary delight a "delicacy" can somehow seem very ironic. You cannot be delicate if you want to try it!