Snake meals commonly known as “Snake pepper soup” have become an essential dainty all over local cuisine in South South Nigeria, especially when it is served with a chilled beer or a plate of ‘Eba and Egusi soup’. Many say they consume snakes because of its nutritional values and its potential to cure diseases of all sorts, including impotence.
Jonathan who is a student at Dublin Business School said his aunt runs a famous snake meat restaurant in Calabar Nigeria. According to him, she started the restaurant in 2015 and it has seen grown into a massive place because of people’s interests in different kinds of dishes that contain snakes meat, especially the most preferred one “point and kill pepper soup”. He added “I worked there at some point and we always have a lot of people coming in. Most of them prefer fresh pepper soup and when they do, we take around the building where we store the live snakes. They point to the one they want and we kill it”
As a result of the demand for these snakes, the Nigerian snake market unequivocally depends on snake meats brought in from bordering countries like; Republic of Benin, Togo, Cameroon, and other European countries.
It is no doubt that even in its wide consumption, snakes meats comes along with severe risk mainly if it was under-cooked, eating such inappropriately can result in a grim medical complexity.
