In 1995 I undertook a brief period of fieldwork in the heart of the tropical forests of Sarawak, Malaysia. The intention had been to measure the energy metabolism of undernourished Iban babies using state-of-the-art stable isotope probes, but in the event the babies proved thoroughly healthy and the research aim was abandoned. Instead, I spent a month living in a long-house and made some simpler anthropometric measurements of children and adults. What I really learnt on this trip had very little to do with formal research and was much more about how the Iban live, work and enjoy themselves. Though formerly headhunters, still with skulls hanging down outside the long-house rooves, they offered unstinting warmth and hospitality throughout our visit.

Many of my strongest memories are about the range of foods we were offered. Steamed fish; tender fern shoots; pleasantly bitter vegetables; many varieties of wonderful red rice that I have never found since; curly-shelled snails, which the children gathered for us every day and which you had to suck out of a gash at the end of the shell with a suitable slurping noise; a duck, which I was obliged to select from the pond myself and carry home in a bag, quacking forlornly; rice wine, broken open at 10 a.m. and knocking me off my feet for the rest of the day. And one day, some men came back from a hunting trip with a pair of bush pig.