My father is a strict vegetarian, which perhaps accounts for his displeasure when I arrived at his Bangkok home clutching a bag of deep-fried caterpillars and other assorted insects.
He demanded I dispose of them instantly. I glanced at my souvenirs from the previous night, a motley collection of wings, bodies and legs from which grease had seeped via a hole in the plastic onto my fingers, creating a vile smell, and I had to admit he had a point.
Seventeen hours earlier, at a roadside stall outside the Sukhumvit subway station, an insect dinner had seemed much more appealing. Fresh from the fryer, the creepy-crawlies had tasted like nutty popcorn. A friend and I had devoured grasshoppers and maggots with gleeful abandon. It had helped that it was too dark to properly see what we were putting in our mouths.
It was the first time I had eaten insects, but not the first time I’d eaten something most people would consider repulsive. In the name of journalistic endeavour I have slurped snake soup in Hong Kong, tucked into fish-head curry in Singapore and timidly nibbled dog meat in Vietnam.
Gulf Air’s destination cities offer numerous opportunities to indulge in culinary eccentricity. Paris offers frogs’ legs, snails and horse meat, London has a scattering of traditional cafés specialising in jellied eels and Frankfurt has blut zungenwurst, a meatloaf made of cow blood and tongue. But it is in Southeast Asia that the extreme eating stakes are raised to another level. In Shanghai there are establishments that serve plates of live shrimps which attempt to bite your fingers as you raise them to your mouth, and live baby octopus that hang on to your chopsticks for dear life (see for yourself on YouTube).
In Manila they have roasted dried chicken’s blood (served in the shape of video cassettes and called “betamax”), bull’s testicle soup and various dishes made from worms. But the star of the show, and perhaps the most nauseating and repellent dish on the planet, is balut, also known as “eggs with legs” or “treat with feet” – an egg containing an unborn duckling. Since the baby hasn’t fully developed, the bones, beak and feathers are tender and soft. In the final round of the US game show Fear Factor, the contestants’ challenge was to eat balut.
Some Filipino supermarkets in Dubai sell balut, but I have never been able to bring myself to try it. At one restaurant in the Emirate, however, I did tryikizukuri, a Japanese dish of live fish. The thing flapped furiously as we picked at it with our chopsticks, and I wondered if the other people in our group were having similar thoughts to mine: does this make us bad people?
The first thing to say in my defence is that I’m not alone. Extreme eating has become something of a fashion. Ten years ago, chef Anthony Bourdain ate iguanas, braised bats and still-beating cobra’s hearts for his book A Cook’s Tour. To write The Man Who Ate Everything, American food obsessive Jeffrey Steingarten became an avowed omnivore, a person who could live up to his book’s lofty title – although he could never bring himself to eat insects. Just as well he never visited Archipelago, then: the menu at this London restaurant includes six-legged specials such as chocolate-covered scorpions and garlic locusts. Meanwhile, the signature dish at the UK’s Fat Duck, regularly hailed as one of the world’s top restaurants, is snail porridge.
Last month, the travel guide publisher Lonely Planet released a book called Extreme Cuisine, a guide to finding “delicacies that creep, crawl, sizzle and spit”. The guide doesn’t only contain grizzly photographs of dishes such as maggot cheese (Italy), guinea pig (Peru), raw chicken (Japan) and alligator cheesecake (USA) – it also tells you where to go to eat them. Extreme eating hasn’t just become socially acceptable – it’s become mainstream.
Most extreme eaters are playing provocateur and showing off, but they are also motivated by a passion for food and a desire for new experiences. As the world becomes increasingly branded and homogenised, it seems harder to find that rare commodity we call authenticity. When we eat like cavemen, we leave the other tourists behind and become liberated from squeamish culinary prejudices.
Unfortunately, the longer my friend and I searched for scorpions and cockroaches in Bangkok, the flimsier this argument became. All the stalls selling insects were on Khao San Road and Sukhumvit, where backpackers and tourists frequented cheap bars and seedy nightclubs. As I photographed my friend snapping a grasshopper thorax between his front teeth, I caught the vendor’s seen-it-all-before stare. Were deep-fried insects only eaten by inebriates with cameras? Were we really that predictable? I wasn’t a global citizen. I was a tourist in search of a cheap thrill.
At least there was nothing inauthentic about the intestine soup we found at MBK, one of Bangkok’s busiest shopping malls. There is nothing glamorous or witty about eating thick coils of fat. We didn’t look cool eating durian, either. It’s a fruit often compared unfavourably to old socks, sewage and rotting flesh, although Thais are more likely to tell you it’s a heavenly combination of wine, cheese and almonds. It’s so smelly it’s banned in most public places, and although I’m not a fan, I felt vindicated when the stall owner told me that foreigners aren’t meant to eat it.
I also found bowlfuls of authenticity in the restaurants of Bangkok’s Chinatown. Bird’s nest soup is made from an actual bird’s nest, constructed entirely from birds’ hardened saliva. It is a downright unpleasant thing to put in one’s mouth, and is prohibitively expensive. In parts of China it is cited as a miracle cure for all manner of illness. I certainly can’t imagine anybody eats it for fun.
As I wandered through Chinatown, I saw numerous edible oddities I felt compelled to try – heads, feet, tongues and the legendary ant-egg soup, a staple of the extreme eating circuit. I returned to Chinatown in search of meat a few days later, but something was very wrong. Where I had once seen tendons I now saw tofu. It was the first day of the Vegetarian Festival, and the whole of Chinatown was meat-free.
I had a bowl of vegetarian curry and headed home, visibly distraught. My father asked me what was wrong. He laughed out loud when I told him.
Originally published in Gulf Life magazine.
