KEY POINTS:
I'm about to eat ... algae. I don't know whether it's the unusual word, with its doubled vowels, or the definite mental associations with pond scum and dirty shower curtains, but "algae" isn't really something that immediately sounds appetising. Not like "pork chop", "peach Melba" or "all-day-breakfast sandwich". No, "algae" has an unsavoury ring to it like "fungus", "amoeba" or "drool".
But here, in the ancient Laotian capital of Luang Prabang, I am determined to do the business, to actually get some algae down my neck, no matter what it sounds like. And this is because I want to test the World Health Organisation's latest thinking: that in an age of food shortages, it's time to move on from hamburgers and kebabs, from spaghetti and fried chicken, and that it's time to think of eating less obvious foods.
But where's the best place to see if this advice works? Where in the world do they make a speciality of such fare? Where are the world's most experimental and adventurous gourmets? There is only one answer: Indochina. In this green, wet, sunny, fertile corner of the globe, homo sapiens has taken to cooking, boiling, steaming, roasting and fricaseeing the very strangest comestibles known to man.
I've learnt this first-hand. A few years ago, when I visited Guangzhou, the southernmost of China's great cities, I discovered the Qingping food market at the throbbing, gristly heart of the metropolis. It was full of way-out stuff. And I don't mean pigs' trotters and curly kale. Owls, crows, de-quilled porcupines, rats, beavers, miserable-looking squirrels, half-dead vultures, bears, mice, rays, twitching reptiles, snakes sliced in half from tongue to tail with their tiny pink hearts still beating - you name it, in Guangzhou's huge, smelly, wet, weird, noisy, thronging Qingping market, you could buy it, and you could eat it. It was stunning and deeply disconcerting. My travelling companion and I wandered around the stalls and open-air cafes quite dumbfounded. We would have had our mouths hanging open in amazement, except we were too scared someone might pop a lizard in.
The piece de resistance came as we approached what we thought was a very neglectful pet store until we realised that the cats stuffed into boxes were being sold for someone's supper, as were the dogs in wicker cages, the hamsters in old crates, the sad green turtles in rubber tubs, and the distraught frogs in big, plastic buckets.
And then there were the scorpions. At the end of the main drag of Qingping we happened upon a group of guys gathered around a shallow bowl full of scuttling little scorpions. In sign language and non-existent Cantonese, we asked the owner what they were for. Pets? Toys? Joke gifts? We simply couldn't believe they were food. Even the Chinese wouldn't go that far, would they?
The scorpion-seller gave us an old-fashioned look and picked one of the scorpions by the stinger and dangled it over his mouth. And then he swallowed it. Of course. The scorpions were for eating. What else?
That trip around Qingping was my first introduction to the weird and wacky foods of Southeast Asia, my first intimation that this was a part of the world where they consume perhaps the craziest yet most stimulating cuisine on the globe.
And what did I have for lunch that day? Banana fritters. Yep. I funked it. I couldn't even hack a tiny bit of hamster. And ever since, I have regretted my cowardice. How do I know that sliced owl isn't wonderful? And if it is, what does that mean? Could diced kestrel relieve the food shortages of Egypt?
So this is why I am in Luang Prabang, at the beginning of a culinary tour through the eerier cuisines of Indochina. My aim, roughly, is to follow the Mekong, the great river of the region, all the way down to southern Cambodia. I want to finish in Cambodia because I have heard there is an entire city, in those parts, where they eat massive roast spiders. That seems to me to be the ultimate in culinary creativity.
But first, I've got to guzzle my algae. And here it is. A winsome Laotian waitress has brought me a little dish of ... well, surprise, surprise, it looks like ordinary seaweed. Like the nice stuff you get wrapped round sushi. I must admit I thought Luang Prabang's famous delicacy algae would be a lot worse, perhaps because of what I've read about its preparation. The reeking river algae is apparently scraped off the surface of the Mekong, then dried on mats, and that's it.
Yet this seems okay. A few squares of paper-thin, dark-green stuff, flavoured with sesame seeds. And it tastes okay, too. In fact, I'd go as far as to say it is delicious. Savoury, salty, moreish.
Filled with the epicurean joys of river scum, I set off to catch the plane from the drowsy temples of Luang Prabang to the teeming streets of Bangkok. I want to try the famous insect cuisine of the north-east Thai region of Isan, which is said to be widely on sale in the capital, before I lose my nerve for horrible comestibles.
As I fly, I think about food taboos, especially those that apply to insects. We in the developed world have a phobia about eating six- and eight-legged critters. This is strange, because eating insects is actually the norm in as much as it is practised in many countries. In Mexico, they like grasshoppers. Aborigines adore witchetty grubs. Nepalese like to scramble a liquor made from squashed bee larvae.
But few of these cultures have such an advanced, entomophagous attitude as the Isan people. And given that many of the women working the red-light districts of Bangkok are from Isan, the city's fleshpots are some of the best places to find the insecty food: the sex workers like to snack on mealworms after a hard night's go-go dancing. It's their version of kebabs or oven-warmer pies.
Sure enough, right outside the rocking entrance to notorious Nana Plaza, I find a foodstall racked high with waterbugs, cockroaches, caterpillars, stick insects and crickets. At least I think that's what they are, I'm no entomologist, especially when it comes to identifying dinner.
Handing over my 50 baht ($2), I take a big selection of the cooked insects back to my hotel room. Over the next hour, between copious draughts of Singha beer, I sample each of them in turn. And they are all, sort of, edible. The fact that they have been deep-fried and heavily salted assists. As does the beer. It's like eating a plateful of chewy crisps, only these have legs and a subtle, rather earthy flavour. I shan't be eating them again, ever, but neither have I thrown up.
Onwards across the border. An hour's flight brings me to Siem Reap, the little Cambodian town that prospers on the many visitors to nearby Angkor Wat. In the fetid and crowded market of the town I find the red ant sellers. Three jolly women with a big bucket of red ants. My guide tells me that these are used as a sour, sweet, colourful flavouring for fruits and cold salads, a bit like cinnamon. Only with antennae.
The jolliest red ant seller offers me a handful. Having got the bug for insect-eating, I down them quite happily. The taste is indeed cinnamony. Well almost. It's also tart. With a hint of grit. Not exactly delicious. Certainly not nice enough to eat the big green queen ant that the ant seller keeps foisting upon me. With a rictus smile I refuse the generous offer of this ginormous bonus ant and instead I give the old lady running the stall a dollar bill. She laughs and claps, as happy as Larry.
A few kilometres out of town, my guide pulls up at a little shack on a winding roadside. This is real boondocks Cambodia. Little kids are staring at me like they've never seen a white man before, which they probably haven't.
Then it's my turn to do a double-take when I see the dried snakes. The stall's main feature is the world's most unattractive food display I have ever seen - a plastic tray of orangey red snakes, all dried out into tormented, writhing positions. Yummy. There are some coiled-up fresh snakes, too. Cutting me a slice of fresh snake, my guide hands it over. I munch, pensively. It's gamey and bony at the same time. Fairly unpleasant, but you'd eat it if you were starving. It definitely does not taste like chicken. Not any chicken I've had, anyway, and I've eaten KFC in Azerbaijan. No, this snake has a flavour, aroma and texture all its own. It tastes like snake, I guess.
A few minutes' drive brings us to another foodstall. In a big, steel pot, a dozen large eggs are boiling away. Eggs? Pah! I look at my guide with arrogant disdain. I want a gustatory challenge, not eggs!
He bids me look again, as one egg is fished out of the pot and cracked open. Immediately a weird, meaty, rich, pungent yet still eggy smell fills my nostrils. Oh my god. I now know what this is. "Pregnant eggs". I've read about these.
They're called "balut" and they are duck eggs that have been fertilised, then left to grow for a fortnight or more, so there is a crunchy, half-formed duck embryo inside. Sure enough, as I stoop down to look at the cracked-open shell, I can see the slimy duck fetus: little feathers, brain, beak, claws, all squidgy and grey, mixed in with the eggy pulp. Closing my eyes, I somehow eat the thing. The taste is, believe it or not, quite nice. But the concept. The concept. A half-formed crunchy duck fetus? Help.
It's the closest I've come to gagging. Yet worse is to come.
My penultimate destination is Phnom Penh, the Cambodian capital. In the central market of this poor-but-vibrant city I spy a shop selling dried frogs. They are arranged in an ambitious pyramid, like coffee mugs in design stores. How nasty can they be? I've eaten frogs' legs, and they were okay. With a sense of confidence, I escort one dried frog home. Tonight it's just me, the frog and a nice bottle of wine.
The frog turns out to be monumentally horrible. Chewy, rancid, fishy and somehow sticky, like eating a tiny mummified alien dredged from a toxic swamp. Yuck. It makes the slice of boiled pig uterus I had for lunch seem like a meal fit for the Queen.
So can it still get nastier?
Yes. The next morning I head off for Skuon, the city where they eat tarantulas. No one is quite sure why or how this Cambodian town got the spider-eating thing: some say it is an ancient tradition, some say it's a result of the famine years under the Khmer Rouge, when the people were so pushed for protein they would eat anything so they dug up a few arachnids for elevenses, and the habit stuck.
Whatever the truth of the matter, the good people of Skuon certainly like their spidery snack-attacks. As soon as my car pulls into the main square, women rush out, carrying on their heads aluminium trays of big black spiders, freshly roasted and covered in sugar, monosodium glutamate, and ready-mix sauce. I'm not joking, that's how the good ladies of Skuon prepare their grilled arthropods.
Anyhow, here goes. I'm biting into a tarantula leg. It's reasonably edible. Sweet and crunchy. Like a stale potato chip dipped in syrup. Hmm. But then I get to the big black thorax which is tough leathery and bulging with creamy grey brown stuff which might be spider excrement.
I can't do it. I can't eat this. Furtively, so as not to offend the nice spiderwoman, I drop my half-eaten tarantula on the ground, and kick it under the car. Reflexively, I can hear my mother say: "Sean, don't do that, there are people starving out there who would love to finish that off". But no, Mum, they wouldn't. It's a tarantula.
And so my odyssey comes to an end. I've eaten ants, snake, caterpillars, algae, duck foetus, cockroaches, pig uterus, waterbug, dried frog and roast tarantula covered in sauce. When I get back to the hotel I notice I have something of the traveller's tummy. Guess I must have a sensitive digestion.
TASTE THE DIFFERENCE
The world's strangest snacks
Beijing penis
China is home to just one restaurant specialising in penises. Guolizhuang, in Beijing, dishes up penis platters with members from animals including dogs, donkeys and tigers (at $9000 a pop).
Chernobyl cep
They look and taste like standard mushrooms, but the ceps that grow in the Ukranian town of Slavutych exhibit eight times the level of radiation poisoning considered safe for humans. Icelandic fermented shark New York chef Anthony Bourdain has described shark thorramatur as "the single worst, most disgusting and terrible tasting thing" he has ever eaten. The gutted fish is fermented in sand for 12 weeks. The meat is then cut up and hung to dry for months. A brown crust is removed before eating.
Indonesian kopi luwak coffee
These Sumatran coffee beans earn their delicacy status after their long journey through the digestive tract of civets - small, cat-like animals. Once collected, they are scrubbed clean and, when brewed, have a chocolate-like flavour.
Italian maggot cheese (casu frazigu)
The Piophila casei fly deposits its eggs in the cheese. Maggots hatch and move through the cheese, excreting enzymes that give an overwhelmingly pungent smell and rotten taste, offset by a soft and creamy texture.
Japanese blowfish
It's thought that blowfish, which have an organ containing poison, kill 300 people a year. So deadly is it that only licensed chefs can prepare it. Get it wrong and paralysis follows until the lungs seize up and you suffocate. Korean baby mouse rice wine Advertised online as a traditional Korean health tonic, it is simply rice wine stuffed with baby mice. Apparently it tastes like petrol.
Mexican escamole
Escamoles are made from the eggs of black ants harvested from the agave cactus or maguey tree. Their taste is close to that of corn and are used as a taco filling. The ants do sting, though, so if you go escamole-collecting, make sure you wear some thick gloves.
Rocky Mountain oyster
Rocky Mountain oysters don't have the same aphrodisiac properties as their marine namesakes. Not surprising really, considering they are buffalo, boar or bull testicles coated in flour, peeled, pounded flat and deep-fried.
Tarantula
What can you say about the decidedly unlovely tarantulas of Skuon? Except that they aren't very lovely. Certainly, they are much-prized in Cambodia - anyone who goes to Skuon is expected to bring back a bag of big roasted spiders for the kids. When told that these rancid, sugared arachnids are less than popular in the West, Cambodians are shocked and surprised. They find Western cheese-eating equally repugnant, of course.
Cricket
Again, these are served freshly roasted, and very salty, from the innumerable insect stalls dotted around Thailand's cities. A special feature of the crickets are the diaphanous and silvery wings, which, when mashed between the teeth, give the odd impression you are eating a recently microwaved fairy. Peter Pan would be appalled.
Water beetle
The people of the Isan region in north-east Thailand are fabled for their adventurous eating habits: one town north of Bangkok is renowned for selling huge baked forest rats around harvest time. But it's the insect-eating of Isan that is most striking: villagers go out at all hours to harvest many varieties of bugs. Big, black water beetles, with their scrunchy moreishness, are regarded as a special delicacy. The legs get stuck between your teeth, though.
Pig's uterus
Fresh, hot, steaming sow's womb is a must-try in the vivacious food markets of Indochina. The locals like to boil or steam it in steel pans, then slice it into delicate little circles somewhat like calamari, but much more worrying. The coils of uterine pig tissue have a texture somewhere between a rubber band and the spongy stuff that comes out of broken sofas; they are traditionally dipped in hot chilli for extra flavour.
Snake
Snake has a strange flavour, somewhat like eating the leg of an aged hare, though it is somewhat stringier. Even nicer is snake egg - like consuming a small, greasy, yellow eyeball. Then there's snake heart and snake blood, much beloved of many Asian cultures, for the virility they are supposed to provide. Vietnamese eat the heart straight from the still-thrashing cadaver of the reptile.
Ant
The humble ant is jam-packed with all kinds of vitamins and minerals; the only problem is that you have to eat an entire nest to get a decent meal. The taste is a little bit peppery, a little bit earthy and the texture is a little bit scratchy. Only the bravest of the brave eat the inch-long queen; reports say this seriously chewy creature has an extra oily "squidginess" all its own. Bon appetit.
Dried frog
Various amphibians are downed in Southeast Asia: you can find frogs, newts, salamanders and multicoloured toads which have been skinned, fried, battered and grilled, and otherwise cooked up a treat. Perhaps the most unpleasant preparation to Western tastes is the dried frog. Like eating a very small, chewy, unhygienic, dead mermaid.
- INDEPENDENT
