Who ate the last Mountain Chicken Frog?

I would be happy with a diet of invasive crab cakes and deep-fried insects.

Terrible news! The Mountain Chicken Frog is extinct before I even got a chance to eat one. It’s the fastest extinction ever recorded. Faster than Rabb's fringe-limbed tree frog. Faster than the Western Black Rhinoceros, the Tasmanian Tiger, and the Japanese Sea Lion. The Mountain Chicken Frog might still be with us if it didn’t have such an appetizing name. Chickens and Frogs are delicious and anything that lives in the mountains must be free-range. They should have called it the Fat Swamp Leech or Giant Ditch Toad.

The unfortunate Mountain Chicken Frog was the national dish of Dominica. Every year, thousands of Mountain Chicken Frogs were eaten by islanders and tourists, roasted with garlic and pepper. They grew to 20cm in length and weighed more than a kilo which is a good-sized meal. The recent influx of rich migrants with big appetites on Dominica’s golden passport scheme must have been distressing news for the Frogs. Now the only surviving Frogs live in bio-secure European zoos. Safely off the menu.

Other species that humans have eaten into extinction include:

• The Dodo - Once bountiful on the island of Mauritius, The Dodo proved irresistible to Portuguese sailors in the 1500’s. Apparently tasted like tough turkey.

• Steller’s Sea Cow - Russian seal hunters ate all of these giant Dugongs by 1768, less than 30 years after they were discovered. A victim of its own deliciousness, the Stellar’s Sea Cow tasted like pork or veal.

• Passenger Pigeon - Billions of these gregarious birds once inhabited eastern North America but were all slaughtered for their meat and sold in city markets. The last known Passenger Pigeon, named Martha, died in 1914 at the Cincinnati Zoo. Tasted like duck.

• Eurasian Aurochs - Giant aggressive bovines that actually fought in Roman gladiator arenas. The last one died in Poland from natural causes in 1627. Tasted like beef.

• Great Auk - Like a big cute defenceless penguin. Eaten to death by North Atlantic sailors in the early 1800’s. Tasted like fishy venison.

• The giant Sea Tortoise of Mauritius - Survived for 30 million years until sailors discovered how tasty they were. Friendly and slow moving, they were easily captured and consumed during long sea voyages. Lean and flavourful, similar to chicken or veal.

• Moa - Great big flightless bird from New Zealand that grew nearly four metres high. By 1445, all Moa had been hunted into extinction. Hard to find comparisons with modern food but apparently tasted delicious. The truly gigantic Haast's Eagle also became extinct as it had relied on the Moa for food.

I love exotic food, but it has taken me a long time to realise the impact of my appetite. I worked as a seafood exporter for many years and was lucky enough to travel around the world, often on the same flight as the fish I had sold and processed. I got to meet the end user and understand what they liked about the species I was selling and learn about how it was used in their food culture.

In Japan I ate whale, live squid and octopus. In Germany I ate horse, in Vietnam I ate frogs and snakes. I drank the snake’s blood, ate its still-beating heart and gall bladder. In Taiwan I unknowingly ate rooster testicles much to the amusement of my chaperone and probably the most disgusting thing I have ever had to stomach, stinky tofu.

I am not proud of eating whale, not proud of giving in to the peer pressure to eat whale and I can remember it not tasting that great, oily, salty and bitter. Hundreds of years ago humans could be forgiven for eating everything they came across. They were probably starving and there was plenty of tasty flora and fauna available to provide a meal. But we don’t have that excuse now. Most of us have a choice about what we eat and many of us are still making the wrong choice.

I am glad to be out of the commercial seafood business. Commercial fishing fleets around the world have caused so much damage, pillaging fish stocks to the brink of extinction, devastation of the sea-bed from bottom trawling, and the terrible damage lost and discarded nets do as they float around killing indiscriminately. A permanent wall of death. There are a lot of good people doing great work in the industry to educate and ensure the survival of the ocean inhabitants. But there is also a lot of greed and over catching with no thought to the future.

What happens underwater is difficult to regulate. But what happens on land is easy to see. We know massive dairy farms are bad. Cows farting methane, fouling the land and the runoff pollutes our waterways, but people still want to eat beef. In 2020, Australia, USA and Hong Kong were the biggest meat eaters per capita. Each person consuming around 120kg of meat per year, about 330 grams every day. Your average New Zealander ate 100kg of meat in 2020.

We experimented a lot with fake meat when living in New Zealand. Impossible burger patties and No Bull beef were probably the tastiest meat alternatives, but they are not cheap, very processed and they did seem to give me uncomfortable amounts of embarrassingly putrid flatulence which added to the methane problem and was not helpful for domestic tranquillity. Living here in Bali we don’t fancy the red meat. We eat a lot of chicken and fish which is also problematic. The sustainability of the fisheries is questionable, there is the microplastics problem, and seeing the poor featherless chickens in tiny cages on the back of trucks is disturbing.

The demise of the Mountain Chicken Frog may be offset somewhat by the rise of the Chinese Mitten Crab. Now that’s a delicious sounding crab. It’s one of the 100 worst invasive species in the world, voracious predators that seem to eat everything. The females spawn between 500,000 and one million eggs in one go. They live in the ocean but spawn in fresh water and are taking over European waterways. They seem impossible to stop even taking up residence in swimming pools. The Chinese Mitten Crabs grow big, and they taste great. Subtle sweet prawn and lobster like umami with large quantities of proteins, calcium and vitamins.

I would be happy with a diet of invasive crab cakes and deep-fried insects. But if things get really bad, if society crumbles and democracies fall in the face of rising seas, rising temperatures and billions of starving citizens, then I wouldn’t mind eating the rich. I know it’s an old trope, and a great song but we could start with Elon, Jeff and Mark. Take their money and use it to repair the planet, then have a billionaire’s barbeque. Billionaires would probably taste great too with all the rich food they eat. Foie gras for breakfast, caviar for lunch and wagyu for dinner. Marinated Musk muscle, braised Bezos bicep and spicy Zuckerberg zingers. Yum!