RENDERED 27: Eels
And their Mysterious, Queer Charm
I like to think I’ve always been something of a “gourmande.” I have always had a healthy appetite, thanks to which I have gotten into the good graces of those around me. As a kid, I never wanted to be “difficult,” so I ate whatever was put in front of me. Whether I actually liked it or not. It wasn’t until recently that I “came out” to my husband and admitted that I dislike raw tomatoes, that I think ratatouille sucks, and that smoked salmon and apple juice are kinda nasty. He laughed it off, but I felt a bit chagrined… I recently served myself a tiny portion of ratatouille at a barbecue among his coworkers, and the host commented on how little I took… I couldn’t tell her that I only took it to be polite, that no matter how well she cooked it, I was going to choke it down just because I didn’t want to be a rude guest. I admit, I’m great at keeping my poker face while swallowing something detestable.
When I was an exchange student in Japan, my host parents were happy to have an open-stomached person like me in their home. For the midsummer Doyo no Ushi no Hi (Day of the Ox), it is traditional to eat eel–most commonly, unagidon (eel over rice). It’s said to help fortify you against the intense muggy heat of Japanese summers. When my host mother brought home a hefty serving for each of us, I learned that fatty eel in Japan is preferable: it’s tender and flavorful, but heavy and cloying to unaccustomed palates. It’s also not an inexpensive dish.
When I was unable to finish the entire serving, I didn’t need to see the shock and disappointment on my host mother’s face to feel ashamed of my stomach. It had betrayed me! It’s one of the few times in my life that I was unable to override my digestive instincts and push through to finish the food set in front of me.
I remember this so vividly because I felt guilty my host mother had wasted her money on me, but also because she looked at me with a regard that I’d spent my entire life trying to avoid. Perfectionism, gritting my teeth through discomfort, putting up with the untenable without giving an inkling as to my real feelings. That eel had broken through my tummy’s defenses and put a crack in the veneer I had so carefully constructed.
Here in the Loire Valley, eel is an occasional treat that I don’t often indulge in. But every summer, something inevitably reminds me of that digestive failure, and the memory stings every time.
Squiggly, squirmy eels have puzzled humans since ancient times. They live in murky waters and dance at night, leading mysterious lives that have escaped human’s hunger to comprehend them. The strange question of their origin has been food for folklore in cultures around the world.
The Egyptians of antiquity suspected eels were generated from the sun warming the Nile River. Aristotle thought they generated spontaneously from mud.
Pacific Island cultures have various folktales featuring eels. The Abaia is a mythical creature in Melanesian lore: it is a giant eel that lurks at the bottom of freshwater lakes that brings tidal waves and storms to destroy those who would disturb its home or its children. Māori folklore tells of a giant eel named Tuna, which the demigod Māui split in half, thus creating saltwater conger eels and freshwater eels. In Samoan mythology, the story of Sina and the Eel describes the creation of the first coconut tree.
Micmac lore tells stories of the battle of Eel versus Lobster, which permanently muddied the waters of the Petitcodiac River.
The life cycle of the European eel:
The Sargasso Sea, a vaguely-defined section of the western Atlantic Ocean, is where teeny-tiny baby eels are born. They are transparent, leaf-shaped buggy-eyed creatures, and spend up to 2 years traveling along the Gulf Stream across the ocean, towards Europe. During this time, they elongate into clear “glass eels.” Once they spread into the waters of the Mediterranean, North Africa, and Western Europe, they become adolescent “elvers.” Once they enter fresh water, they take on a yellow-brown color and become adult eels. They live out their nocturnal existence in fresh water, from anywhere between 6 and 60 years, until they reach their final stage. Once it’s time to mate, they take on a silvery sheen, their head shape changes and their digestive system dissolves–they won’t need it anymore. They head downstream back into the ocean, traveling back along the Gulf Stream to the Sargasso Sea, mate, and then die.
Eels do not develop sex organs until they become silver. They will mate once, and only once, just before they expire.
Eels cannot mate in captivity. Fishers collect the elvers (often from the coast of France and the Iberian Peninsula) and raise them in eel aquaculture facilities.
There are 15 species in the Anguilla genus, which live around the world, but may have originated in the Indo-Pacific. Anguilla rostrata lives in North American waters, while Anguilla japonica is native to east Asia; two distinct eel species are native to Aotearoa (New Zealand), and Anguilla anguilla (the European eel) roams around Europe, the Mediterranean, and North Africa. All of these species are threatened, with the European eel classified as critically endangered.
This is due to overfishing, but also because the eel is vulnerable to parasites and diseases, changing ocean currents due to climate change, and human-made dams that obstruct its migration.
Another threat to the eel’s survival is illegal trade: there is a thriving European eel poaching industry. Elvers are clandestinely collected en masse, then trafficked abroad (mostly to China) via Spain and Morocco, Eastern Europe, or the Balkans. Elvers can sell for up to 4,000 euros per kilo on the Chinese black market (about US $2,000 per pound). France is a hotspot for eel poaching: in 2019, ⅕ (one-fifth) of Europe’s trafficked eels were caught in Bordeaux alone.
Morays, congers, and hagfish all look like eels, but they are not true eels because they are not members of the Anguilla genus. “Eelskin” is used like leather in boots, wallets, and the like. Despite its name, it is not actually the skin of eels, but hagfish.
Eels seem to defy the laws of nature–adults do not possess sex organs. How could this be? Sigmund Freud obsessed over this question to the point that, during a summer when he could’ve been chillin’ with his homies by the water, he dissected hundreds of eels looking for reproductive organs that just weren’t there–not one ovary, not one testis. Leave it to Freud to obsess over eel gonads. What a nerd.
What Freud didn’t know was that eels don’t even develop sex organs until their final stage of life. Scientists didn’t crack the question of eel reproduction until late last year, when eels geotagged in the Azores made it to their mating grounds in the Sargasso Sea, which confirmed the long-held yet never-proven hypothesis.
But we still don’t know everything: eels have never been observed mating, and there has never been a single eel found in the Sargasso Sea, alive or dead.
If you’re a piscivore, eels make for good eatin’. They were enjoyed among Greeks and Egyptians in the ancient world. Eel pies were some of the first readymade foods sold in Parisian markets from the 1400’s. They are appropriate for meat-free religious holidays like Lent, so throughout Europe they have been enjoyed for centuries in pies, smoked, stewed, layered and cooked into savory cakes, and grilled. Kabayaki is the Japanese method of preparation, dating back to the 1600’s: the eel meat is grilled and basted with a sweet soy sauce and served over rice. Approximately 90% of global eel production is destined to become kabayaki.
The Māori would prepare eel meat by wrapping it in various types of leaves and roasting. To preserve eel meat, drying and curing techniques were traditionally employed, as well as traps in landlocked ponds and cages in streams to keep live eels in stock.
17th century texts describe Iroquois grilled eel and Algonquin smoked eel. Fish soup with eel and corn was recorded by the English settlers in the early days of the New England colonies–in fact, eel was one of the few foods that was easily recognizable to those foreign settlers, hopelessly lost and out of their depth in “the New World.”
Eel must never be eaten raw: there is a lethal toxin in eel blood. This toxin is a protein that breaks down during the cooking process.
German psychiatrist Ernst Jentsch wrote of the “unheimlich” (“not of home” or “uncanny”) in a 1906 essay. Freud expanded on this by adding the notion of familiarity to the mix. (You may be familiar with the “uncanny valley” phenomenon.) When the familiar somehow becomes unfamiliar, we get ooky-spooked. We’re suddenly unsure about what we’re dealing with, causing an unpleasant feeling of unease.
What better animal than the eel to encapsulate such an idea?
Eels are slippery and creepy… they live at night, slither like water snakes, and are generally rather unsettling. They evade rationality, and their origins and mating behavior wasn’t elucidated until 2022. They’re mysterious and downright strange. Certainly not a creature I’d like to run into while skinnydipping in an estuary.
But it exists, agendered and delicious, for a variable number of years before silvering. It could take 6 years or 60 years for them to silver and enter their last stage of life.
I turned 37 this month. Perhaps I’m going through a mid-life crisis, an existential transformation, or just a regular ol’ burnout. This summer, as I have experienced many conflicting feelings, anxieties, and feelings of failure and incompetence, my thoughts have also been filled with eels. Sleepless nights have returned me to this animal that’s oddly become my touchstone.
No two eels are the same–each leads a queer, un-uniform existence. I came to find this comforting. Let me be like the eel, I’ve decided. I have a desire to explore questions that have murky answers. Those questions live in the depths of strange waters.
Indeed, I navigate strange waters these days. At the ripe ol’ age of 37, I grow weary of swallowing the untenable while my insides erode.
Creating one’s own mythology sometimes feels like trudging upstream alone through mud at midnight, and feeling like a failure when you’re not further along. All the while, trying not to show how hard it is. The truth is, I’m having a hard time. Why deny the fact that my life cycle involves periodic dips into the mud? It was written into my DNA. As long as I haven’t silvered yet, there is still time to create my own mythology, write my own creation myth.
As a girl who grew up communing with the ocean, I find comfort in being near the water. Any water. Here in the Loire River valley, I content myself to stroll along the flow of the river and its various tributaries. Watching the water flow, imagining within the eels that now know nothing but murky tide. Like the eels, I was born into saltwater memories, and live now in my adopted freshwater home, opaque and fast-running. And one day, I too will silver and make the long swim back to the saltwater whence I came.
Until then, I wish to live in a mythology that is my own flavor of queer, that flows at an honest, untouchable pace.
The Story of the Eel and the Snake (as retold by Lari)
Eel could find no safe haven from the danger of People. Eel was always evading water traps and dodging kitchen cleavers. There was no rest for Eel, and it grew tired of running. Eel chose a quiet river bank to take a pause among the reeds, when Snake came slithering up. “What’sss up, Cousin?” asked Snake. Eel replied: “Oh, Snake, how I envy you… we look so similar, and yet you have nothing to fear from People. Why is it they hunt me so viciously, and yet they dare not touch you?” Snake opened its jaws to display its frightful venomous fangs and hissed: “It is becaussse I am rarely harmed with impunity... People are not eager to harm those who are swift to avenge themselves.”
Eel returned to the dark water, encouraged by remembering that it, too, possessed a sharp smile.
(Adapted from the French translation of fable of the Eel and the Snake by Laurentius Abstemius in his Hecatomythium, 1490, entitled “De anguilla conquerente, quod magis quam serpens infestaretur”)
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Bibliography
“Abaia.” Mythical Creatures Guide.
ANGUILLIDAE. Cultured Aquatic Species Information Programme. Text by Xie, J.. Fisheries and Aquaculture Division [online]. Rome. Updated 2006-07-28.
ANGUILLIDAE. Cultured Aquatic Species Information Programme. Text by The Danish Aquaculture Development Group (DANAQ). Fisheries and Aquaculture Division [online]. Rome. Updated 2005-02-07.
Aphthonius. “Fables d'Aphtone et d'Abstémius, traduites par M. Pillot.” Bibliothèque nationale de France, département Littérature et art. Page 37.
Briggs, Helen. “Ancient eel migration mystery unravelled.” BBC, 15 Oct 2022.
“The Chocolate Waters of the Petitcodiac River.” First People of America and Canada – Turtle Island.
Davidson, Alan and Tom Jaine, ed. The Oxford Companion to Food, Third Edition. Oxford University Press, 2014. p. 275, 279.
“Doyō no Ushi no Hi: Japan’s Midsummer Day of the Ox.” Nippon.com, 21 Jul 2022.
“European Eel.” National Geographic Animals.
Gardiner, Alan; "Eel Oddities," Fortean Times, no. 56, p. 53, Winter 1990. From Science Frontiers #74, MAR-APR 1991.
Jarvis, Brooke. “Where do Eels Come From?” The New Yorker, 18 May 2020.
Keane, Basil. 'Te hopu tuna – eeling', Te Ara - the Encyclopedia of New Zealand.
“One Good Fact.” Britannica, 14 May 2023.
Saintourens, Thomas. LE MONDE: THE TRAFFIC IN TROUBLED WATERS OF GLASS EELS. 23 Nov 2021. English translation: https://www.sustainableeelgroup.org/le-monde-the-traffic-in-troubled-waters-of-glass-eels/ Original article in French: https://www.lemonde.fr/societe/article/2021/11/23/le-trafic-en-eaux-troubles-des-civelles_6103212_3224.html
Schweid, Richard. “Consider the Eel.” Gastronomica, vol. 2, no. 2, 2002, pp. 14–19. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.1525/gfc.2002.2.2.14.
Svensson, Patrik. “Ashes to Ashes, Eel to Eel.” The Paris Review, 1 July 2020.
Svensson, Patrik. “On the Many Mysteries of the European Eel.” Literary Hub, 26 May 2020.
I like hearing about your past adventures and how your current topic always recalls a past food experience. 🥰