Watching random videos at night reminded me of this particular photo I have always found fascinating.
Somewhat inevitably I can't find it anymore, but I know where it came from. Back in my grandparents' old place there was a year's worth of National Geographic magazines. 1990? 1991? Early '90s. I flipped through them for no reason other than to look at things; I certainly didn't have the attention span to read the articles at age seven.
But one photo did catch my attention. It was in a feature about elephants. I always came back to that feature, which is probably why I also remember this series of photos where elephants found one of their own, dead, and flock around the body to seemingly mourn it.
But that's not the photo that fascinated me. It was in another page, accompanying a sequence of photos seemingly about elephants who were being hunted, or more likely, poached. No, it's not a photo of a dead animal - but it's there - but rather, it's a photo taken in a supermarket shelf, of cans of elephant meat.
Elephant meat in a can.
As a seven-year-old, I always found that fascinating. Not just the idea that some people eat elephant - I may have been curious, but I knew I wouldn't ever get to try it - but the idea that there's a can with a label that says "elephant meat". That label looked good to me, a kid who had spent too much time looking at newspaper pages and magazine pages and can labels and all that sort. That, more than the contents of the can, told me there's a bigger world out there.
Does that explain why I enjoy going to supermarkets in foreign cities? Perhaps, but thinking back, I don't think I have stared so closely at labels in my recent visits to Hong Kong, Singapore or Bangkok. Maybe it's because I'm now 37, and I do my own grocery shopping. I'm a different person now, and I say this with no regret. But maybe I should look at it like a seven-year-old again. Next time.
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