How do you eat an elephant?

 How do you eat an elephant?

‘One bite at a time,’ I hear you say. 

No. No, no, no, no and no.

That’s not the answer. Don’t eat elephants. Elephants are too big for one person, the meat would spoil before you’d finished it all assuming that you could catch and kill it in the first place, with its huge strength, wild batting trunk and tough hide. They are also protected animals.

It’s the season of the motivational meme.

January is hard. February tougher. This year, though, it’s all much worse. We were promised sunlit uplands and we have post-pandemic recession with a government that can’t negotiate. Most people have switched off from the news, fingers in ears, la la la, don’t tell me. I don’t want to know about strikes or patients dying in corridors, or redundancies, or men hitting their wives over the head with an axe because they kissed someone from Towie. Even Towie isn’t going to drag me into that story. They’ve even started reporting climate change because we’re not following any news, so they might as well.

When life is difficult people will encourage you to push through. Eat that elephant. One bite at a time.

But elephants shouldn’t be eaten. 

I checked. It was my 3am question last night. Do people eat elephants and if they do what do they taste like?

I went to the journals of Victorian explorers who were chided into eating elephant by locals. Mostly though they didn’t enjoy it. 

Paul de Chaillu wrote in his book for children (1898) Wildlife Under the Equator, ‘The first mouthful I put in my mouth caused cheer after cheer to go up. “The ntanga is eating! The ntanga is eating of the elephant!”’

I’m struck by how good this tribe’s English was but also how they used an untranslatable name for him. 

He goes on to describe it as a pretty tough piece of meat, ‘the grain course and the meat tasteless and dry.’ He had been given his own, specially cooked dish, ‘boiled smoked foot of elephant’ rather than the large piece of elephant that had been boiling since the day before. He was so pleased that he had been fed the part considered to be a delicacy.

Dr Livingstone (I presume) was also given the foot.

We had the foot thus cooked for breakfast next morning, and found it delicious. It is a whitish mass, slightly gelatinous, and sweet, like marrow. A long march, to prevent biliousness, is a wise precaution after a meal of elephant’s foot. Elephant’s trunk and tongue are also good, and, after long simmering, much resemble the hump of a buffalo, and the tongue of an ox; but all the other meat is tough, and, from its peculiar flavour, only to be eaten by a hungry man.

This wouldn’t be my description of delicious but the chocolate digestive hadn’t been invented.

Business psychologists have been talking about a phenomenon they have called ‘quiet quitting’, which is a stupid phrase implying that refusing to eat the elephant is the same as eating nothing. The rich are furious about this. How dare people only do the work they are paid for? 

Going above and beyond is fine. Do extra if you want to but if someone asks you to eat an elephant please remember that chocolate digestives were invented in 1925.