Mmmm crunchy!

Now I'm an adventurous diner. You kind of can't be picky when you're Chinese, with delicacies such as whelks in curry sauce and black bean chicken feet on the menu for dim sum (which incidentally are two of my favourite things to order). On my last trip to China years back, I even braved a 'wildlife' dinner, trying snake soup, horse meat and racoon. I even enjoyed it, up until the evil tour guide took us round the back once we had finished munching our way through various courses of fuzzy animals you'd normally feed in the park, just to show us the bereaved siblings sitting in cages, all big eyed and lonely!

But I have to admit, even my culinary prowess trembles at the thought of entomophagy, or for those who get tongue tied, eating bugs. I admit I draw the line at tucking into a locust and rocket salad, or a bowl of larvae (even if they DO apparently "taste like popcorn"!). However, chomping on a bug or three is supposed to be extremely nutritional, according to this article....

The reason I bring this up, is that I read on Sky News about a Japanese chef who has published the "How to cook insects" bible, and regularly ventures to his nearest pet shop to stock up on pregnant spiders, waterbugs and cockroaches to serve to his lucky lucky friends. I gag at the thought! Lucky this is all far far away in Japan right? Wrong! Reading the article dredged up a recollection that there was a restaurant in London that does exactly the same thing, serving crunchy morsels of 6 and 8 legged delicacies to the UK masses. So I had a hunt and found it online. Archipelago...

I have to admit, curiosity has bitten (or was that a bug? hehe) and I'm tempted to give this place a try. Aside from the chilli and garlic locusts and crickets, and chocolate covered scorpions, they serve a whole spread of animals that you'd probably expect to see in a zoo and not on your plate, including crocodile, kangaroo, zebra and gnu. It does raise the question where exactly they order their zebra steaks from... is there a edible zebra farm out there somewhere? Or are the chefs just sneaking into London Zoo and slicing sirloin off unsuspecting animals...

Well, I'll be sure to let you know if I ever swallow that huge ball of aprehension and dive into the unknown. Photos and write up are sure to be blogged. But for now, I think I'll stick to a nice bit of cow thanks.