I Larv' You

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.

Places where bugs can be savored are no longer limited to street food carts. A large variety of worms, locusts and larvae in neat packaging are also available on supermarket shelves. There are also a number of dining establishments that feature insect-inspired cuisine. If you wish to try sushi topped with crispy crickets, palm weevil larvae and silkworms, you can check out I Larb You, a Japanese restaurant.

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.

No shark was harmed in the making of this shark fin soup

Imagine your morning commute. You're riding the metro or the bus or walking down the street when, out of nowhere, somebody jumps you and cuts off your arms and legs. "See you later," he says, walking away with your limbs under his arm.

That's the same thing it happens to a shark when he is being "finned"- as in harvested for its chewy fins, then left still living, but incapacitated. The shark is then tossed back into the sea to die. The grisly practice is done to meet the demand for shark fin soup, an expensive delicacy in some Asian countries cooking.

Like Beijing or Hong Kong, in Bangkok this expensive delicacy is one of the finest ways to flaunt your wealth. In the past, Chinese Emperors loved it because it was rare, tasty and difficult to prepare. Today, its popular with the Thai-Chinese population for the very same reasons, but also eaten as part of feasts to confer prestige on the meal's host, usually special occasions like weddings, banquets or clinching a big business deal.

Erroneously, it's said to have medicinal properties, everything from curing cancer, enhancing appetite, to being beneficial to kidneys, lungs and bones. Some believe it's also an aphrodisiac, though there is no scientific proof shark fin has any ingredients that will improve your sex life.

The irony is not lost on Jaws and his shark species as to how the alpha species, humans, are terror-stricken by them and yet, act like pathological terrorist when wanting to eat them for lunch. For soup no less. Like acts of terrorism, what humans do to sharks is senseless and inhumane. Time to mount an attack on the real predators – humans!