Insect-eating is nothing new or exotic in Thailand. There are carts selling crispy fried grasshoppers only a few steps away from a KFC or a McDonald's. In fact, cooked bugs have been a gastronomic delight among Thai people for centuries and there are around 200 types of edible insects in the Kingdom.
Thailand, however, is not the only bug-eating country in the world. The Food and Agriculture Organisation states that people in 112 other nations in Asia, Africa, Europe and South America have long eaten insects.
An ignorant Westerner like myself would assume that Thais simply eat insects right out of the ground. That's absolutely not what happens. The process of harvesting, cleaning, cooking insects is carried out with all due caution. First of all, there are types of bugs that they don't eat. Secondly, Thais don't eat raw insects and they don't cook dead bugs. The insects must be fresh and alive before preparation. Even just cleaning them requires meticulous work. Some insects need to have certain parts removed before being cooked, including their guts and legs as well as their feces.
To clean feces from a dung beetle's stomach, for example, they let the bugs swim in a bowl of water which will make them excrete all the feces before they prepare them. It takes time and know-how to accomplish this.
Among the most popular are grasshoppers, crickets, water bugs, dung beetles, silkworms, bamboo caterpillars, ant larvae and red ants' eggs.
You have to try them for yourself, but our impression was they taste like shrimp, especially grasshoppers. The only thing that makes a grasshopper different from a shrimp is that they can fly.
I really enjoyed your blog, thanks for sharing.
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