29 July 2026

Eating at London Zoo: At least it’s not camel

How old is too old for alliterative eateries?

Photo by Minkimo/Alamy

To butcher a penguin – Silver Spoon can all but guess – you would need to hang it by its flippers and pluck it as you might a very long duck. Tail, off. And then simply separate the breast meat from the ribcage with a sharp knife (penguins are fatty and sinewy) and detach the legs from the hip joint. Yeehaw – penguin steaks! “Odiferous”, is how the explorer Frederick Albert Cook described the flesh, somewhere between “mammal, fish and fowl”.

I think about this as I watch the happy little creatures gambolling around their enclosure – that’s “England’s largest penguin pool” to you – at London Zoo in Regent’s Park. Humboldt penguins live for, on average, 17 years. One of the oldest recorded of his species, “Mr Sea” lived until he was 31, before he was euthanised. Not for eating, however. I am told it is extremely illegal to eat penguin meat and judging by the “odiferous” nature of the enclosure, it’s not something I would be minded to do anyway. I’d like that on record.

Where were we? Yes, I am at London Zoo to find some lunch – and I know I am looking in the wrong places. So I leave “Penguin Beach”, bypass the voluble macaws, and find myself inspecting two lions. They are motionless, draped over a concrete ledge. Dead, I assume. And too noble for filleting, dicing and mincing anyway. Onwards through the petting zoo, I overhear a teenager inquire “is that a pig?” while gesturing to the most pig-like pig I have just about ever seen. I check up on the camels – yep, doleful and insipid as always.

I skip the hot dogs at the “Peckish Parrot Café” – at 30, I refuse to eat somewhere so alliterative. You might also say at 30 that I shouldn’t be alone on a Thursday afternoon at London Zoo. But everyone matures at their own pace. I eventually find “Amreli Street Food” and order some fries, two pakoras (think balls of fried vegetable) and a Diet Coke. I glance around. It is designed to look like an old-timey Bombay street market. I am afraid to say I’m extraordinarily conscious that I am sitting in the north end of Regent’s Park, however.

And what of my “meal”? The pakoras are fine, hard to dislike. The chips might be some of the worst of my long and storied chip-eating career and 90 per cent of them end up in the bin. The ability to make a potato so chewy is akin to making a horse smart or a cat magnanimous. And yet the enterprising minds down at Amreli Street Food pulled it off. But never mind. The Diet Coke is perfect. And you’re not here for the Orkney scallops or the pressed Fuseau artichoke anyway. This is cheap, dated, fun-fair food for impertinent children and teenagers incapable of identifying pigs. Which is to say, they won’t care.

I am not hungry anyway. I keep going, past the gorillas and giant tortoises. There is an enclosure that claims to have a pygmy hippo within, but you would never know because they don’t like company. Ahead, I see zebras and giraffes. That’s better: classic animals, giraffes. And then I watch a zookeeper toss African hunting dogs meat from a bucket. Chicken wings and horse, he tells me. Just one of the many reasons I have long been glad not to be an African hunting dog.

Perhaps I’ve finally lost contact with my inner child, but I really cannot wait to leave this display cabinet of imported souls – a simulacrum of a simulacrum of the natural world, reproduced and then sold back to us under the false pretence of education. And spare me the utilitarian guff about zoos and conservation. Conserving what? The right for me to stare at an ostrich 25 minutes from the New Statesman’s smoggy Zone 1 office? If ostriches had dignity – and they don’t – this would be a chasmic affront to it.

I have never once entertained the idea of being a vegetarian – animals reared, slaughtered, butchered and cooked by people who care about them and know what they are doing is an essential part of the human condition. And don’t come to me with your misty-eyed sentimentality about pigs being smart because I don’t want to hear it. No, what we have here is something altogether more immoral: a pageant of sad animals – lined up for gormless tourists – better off in the wild or on the plate.

[Further reading: Your guide to cocktail party diplomacy]