In the Danger Zone

• Title Page
  
• Copyright Page
  
• HELLO
  
• AFGHANISTAN Testicles and the Taliban
  
• UGANDA Dining with Refugees
  
• CAMEROON The Bushmeat Paradox
  
• ETHIOPIA Famines and Feasts
  
• CHERNOBYL Cooking with Radiation
  
• SOUTH KOREA The Dog Eaters
  
• IGLOOLIK, ARCTIC CANADA Walrus and Pizzas
  
• HAITI Hell's Kitchen
  
• MEXICO The Tortilla Crisis
  
• BURMA Cooking with Rebels
  
• INDIA The Rat Eaters
  
• CHINA Cooking with Communists
  
• ISRAEL AND PALESTINE God's Pood
  
• So that's it, is it?
  
• A note on sources
  

Stefan Gates

This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author's and publisher's rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

ISBN 9781407022024

Version 1.0

www.randomhouse.co.uk

This book is published to accompany the BBC television series
Cooking in the Danger Zone.

Published in 2008 by BBC Books, an imprint of Ebury Publishing.
A Bandom House Group Company

Copyright © Stefan Gates 2008
Stefan Gates has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

This electronic book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

The Bandom House Group Limited Beg. No. 954009
Addresses for companies within the Bandom House Group can be found at
www.randomhouse.co.uk

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 9781407022024

Version 1.0

Endpapers
Front (top to bottom, left to right): making dumplings in a factory, Henan Province, China (Ruhi Hamid); making friends with a market stall holder, Gulu, Northern Uganda (RH); milking a camel with the Bedouin, Negev Desert, Southern Israel (Marc-Perkins); meeting the Zapatistas, Oventic, Mexico (Alex Mackintosh); holding the tail of a Beluga whale, lgloolik, Canada (MP); taking a break on the way over the Thai-Burmese border (MP); practising Tai Chi, Henan Province, China (RH); eating rat, Paraiya, India (Chris
Alcock); target practice with
the US army, Kabul, Afghanistan (MP); Harry holding a walrus penis-bone near Igloolik, Canada (Stefan Gates); dogs being sold for meat at an auction, Seoul, South Korea (Alex Mackintosh); sitting on The Pig, Nablus, Occupied West Bank (Alaa T. Badarneh); eating betelnut, Ei Tu Ta refugee camp, Burma (MP). Back: patrolling Cite Soliel with UN MINUSTAH soldiers (Galium McRae); Fatah rally, Nablus, Occupied West Bank (SG); eating camel's hump in Beijing, China (SG); drinking honey wine in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia (Julie Noon); eating humus in the Old City, Jerusalem (MP); milking a goat in Yanun, Occupied West Bank (MP); bushmeat seller, Yaounde, Cameroon (SG); tuk-tuk driving lesson in Mumbai, India (CA); waking up in Y'alebo, Ethiopia (JN); preparing civet cat for lunch, Cameroon (Olly Bootle); eating banana tree pupae in Karen village, Burma (MP); Arab members of the Israeli Defence Force on the boundary with Gaza, Israel (SG); eating deep-fried scorpion, Beijing, China (RH); drinking deer penis juice in Beijing, China (Yan Yan).

Bang! An explosion temporarily blinds me. I see a guy sprawled up ahead, covered in blood and screaming hysterically in Arabic, part of his leg blown off. My heart beats out of control as I realize that I'm slap-bang in the middle of a minefield. F**k. There's a place and a time for swearing, and it's here and now. F**k, f**k, P*k.

It hasn't been the best of days: I've already been caught in a mortar bombardment, robbed at gunpoint and administered first aid to two blood-drenched women at the scene of a horrific car crash. To tell the truth, I'm no longer just scared, I'm really f**ked-off and scared, which is a rubbish combination. I'm immobilized by The Fear, an involuntary contraction of both sphincter and brain power. I search my memory for someone to blame for sending me to a place this absurdly dangerous, but it's my own stupid fault. My kids will have to say, 'Daddy died writing a cookery book,' as their mates suppress their giggles. I miss my kids. I miss my wife. I miss my cat. I miss my coffee machine. I despise myself for being here at all. I'm just a weedy, bookish food writer from north London – I wasn't built for war zones.

The adrenalin recedes and I let out a deep sigh. I'm in a pyrotechnic minefield in Herefordshire and the screaming Arab jumps to his feet, right as rain, and berates me in a broad Welsh accent for failing to notice the obvious signs of mines. He watches me go through the motions of sticking my penknife in the ground at an angle as we playact getting out of this sodding mud. Needless to say, I am now thoroughly humiliated and not a little miserable.

I'm on a gruesome course called 'How to Survive Hostile Environments', which is supposed to prepare me for visiting Category I conflict zones like Afghanistan and rebel-held Burma. I've spent the morning with roughty-toughty ex-paras being pistol-whipped and bundled into car boots and watching scratchy videos of people having their fingers cut off by kidnappers. I am now feeling nervous, exhausted, nihilistic and, for some reason, a tad misanthropic. What have I got myself into?

• • • • •

I am about to embark on the craziest project of my life: two years of travelling to the world's most dangerous and complicated countries, using food to understand a world in crisis. I've always believed that food is a window onto emotion, morality and society, but I suspect that it can also reveal the intimate reality of how big issues like war, disaster, religious conflict and hunger have a tangible effect on
real
people.

We rarely see more than a shallow, macro view of the world and its big issues: we see Afghans on the news, screaming and bloodied in front of burning cars; Palestinians burning flags; refugees mournful and powerless. These people are often stripped of their personality and dignity by the needs of the media. I want to meet, talk and live with ordinary people in extraordinary situations to try to understand the world a little better. Perhaps if I sit down to eat with them I'll find them more like me.

But five days before I leave for Afghanistan, The Fear returns. I'm in the middle of presenting a chirpy TV series called
Food Uncut,
which couldn't be more different from the project I'm about to start. The coming two years will be a cycle of two weeks avoiding bullets in the most godforsaken hellholes of the world, followed by two weeks in this cosy TV studio reading autocues and making cheeky banter, then back to the godforsaken hellholes again. I'm hoping it's a way of staying sane.

Anyway, here I am, about to reveal 'What's Hot and What's Not in the World of Food this Week' (marmalade with gold flakes is in, but Asda wet fish is out), when I get an urgent telephone call from my executive producer Will Daws. His voice is unusually sombre.

'I don't know how to say this, Stef, but the BBC high-risk security team has intelligence that 38 would-be suicide bombers have just entered Afghanistan from Pakistan. On top of that, there's a specific group that's actively looking for a Western hostage and things are pretty hairy. It's entirely up to you. If you want to pull out, you can. Have a think about it and call me back.'

So an already crazy idea has become even crazier, and I stumble through the rest of the day's filming barely paying attention to my script. That night I sit down with my wife Georgia and break the news to her. Actually, I'm ashamed to say that I don't give her all the details – in fact, I've largely played down the danger of the whole project, so I just say that things are looking a bit rum out in Persia, but not to worry because I'll be fine. I feel terrible. I've only just come to terms with the prospect of spending two weeks of every month away from her and my two daughters. And now this.

Perhaps I'm stupid, cavalier and selfish to even think about flying around the world searching for danger when I've got two beautiful, bright-eyed little girls who need me. Christ, I'm homesick and missing them like crazy, and I haven't even left my front room. And to top that, I'm now enduring a prolonged, involuntary contraction of my sphincter. This is to become a familiar feeling over the next two years: this is The Fear.

But the simple reality is that this project feels important and useful. I'm also an incurable optimist who believes that good things will happen and that somehow or other things will end up fine. And yes, goddammit, the little boy in me who always wanted to explore the world and do dangerous stuff and get trapped on a desert island and use every tool on his penknife is so excited that he can barely think straight.

I call Will and tell him that I'm going.

I visit the BBC Safety Stores – an extraordinary emporium that sells everything from fluorescent tabards to flak jackets. It's run by two young ladies whose sense of humour is generally in inverse proportion to that of their customers, who are always on a last-minute shopping expedition to somewhere awful, looking for odd items that might help them survive.

The ridiculousness and seriousness of the trip hits me as I look at my reflection, wearing a bright blue flak jacket and matching bright blue helmet – on paper it sounds kinda conflict cool, but the reality is I look and feel like a bright blue, dorky tit with a surprised, speccy look on its face.

There's all sorts of other kerfuffle involved with going to war zones: security briefings, visas, endless injections, army accreditation, water sterilization pills, press passes. There's so much stuff to sort out that before I know it, bugger me if I'm not in Kabul, stuck in the most chaotic traffic I've ever seen. I mention to our driver that insurance must be difficult to arrange in this country. He guffaws at my ignorance. There's no insurance here,' he says, gunning the engine and mounting the mud kerb. Traffic jams are dangerous for Westerners – high danger of kidnap, so it's best not to get stuck. But our driver says, 'You're safe with me – no one's ever been kidnapped from a car when I've been driving.' Then his brow furrows and he adds, 'Actually, now that I think about it, there was one. But just the one, so far.'

My arse cheeks tighten once again as The Fear shivers through me. Welcome to the Danger Zone.

Hang on a minute. . .

You may or may not be aware that this whole escapade is also a BBC TV series, but it's not like any telly I've ever made before. The crew is just me, a local translator/fixer, plus ONE multi-talented genius who is producer, camera operator, director, sound recordist, health-and-safety officer and drinking buddy all rolled into one. There's a fantastic team back in London who run the production, but on location we are very much alone. We use small cameras, hidden radio mics, and carry a couple of satellite phones, and that's about it.

These lovely telly people don't appear in this book anywhere near as much as they should because I tried to avoid just writing about the making of a TV programme. But the truth is that there are 16 separate trips with seven different producers, all of them long-suffering heroes of documentary film-making.

But here's a thing: whereas the BBC TV series of
Cooking in the Danger Zone
has been subjected to the highest, most rigorous standards of BBC Current Affairs journalism, and subjected to the whip-cracking terror of BBC editorial policy to eradicate any hint of bias, this book. . . hasn't.

On the contrary, this book tells the story of one man's personal journey around some of the world's most awful places. And that man was often exhausted, terrified, exhilarated, irrational, overly sympathetic, sentimentally attached, homesick, angry and hungry. He was also writing whilst very emotional at the end of a horribly long day.

And he was occasionally a little drunk.

So I hope that you read these essays for what they are: a polemic, unreasonable, emotional reaction to events as they unfolded to a man at the end of his tether. They are biased towards my personal experience, but they are hopefully of a lot more interesting for it.

Stefan Gates
London, October 2007