In which I recounted requested details...

I'll eat almost anything. Not because I'm an indiscriminating consumer, but because I feel it's hypocritical to travel all over the place and yet reject local foods. Hence the camel burgers and pigeon in Cairo, the crab's brains in Tokyo, and various non-endangered antelopes in Africa. But I've previously drawn the line at insects, for reasons of pure visceral disgust. Having never eaten on before, I expected both taste and texture to repel me, so I've avoided them insistently and felt somewhat less the traveller for doing so.

Yet on Monday evening, while relaxing at a patio bar near my apartment with some coworkers (three Americans and two Burmese), the travelling bug man wheeled his little cart up beside our table. The cart was piled high with a distressingly wide variety of dried and pan-fried insects - crickets, grasshoppers, cockroaches, and a bewildering array of grubs and larvae. Two of the American women in our group bounded gleefully towards the cart and began picking through free samples, munching on crickets and the like, all the while offering the disclaimer "We're from Tennessee!" - which I took to mean that bugs are a staple protein in the American South. While i circled the cart in apprehension and they bought a tray of assorted arthropods, the friendly vendor held a massive metal spoon towards me, laden with insects in an obvious act of charity.

I have no idea how to say "yuck" in Thai, and I didn't want to offend the guy. So, probably facilitated by a curious libation called a "Chinese Eye" (which is, far as I could tell, is neither Chinese nor ocular), I acted before my revulsion reflexes could set in, and quickly picked the most innocuous thing I saw - a mid-sized grub of some variety, most likely a grasshopper larvae.

And I ate it.

I popped it into my mouth, bit down quickly, and swallowed with all haste. It wasn't enough. The texture was grotesque enough, and completely alien - I've never eaten an entire animal in one bite before, organs and all. Gooey and foul. The taste, however, was in an entirely different league - a noxious blend of insect innards that polluted my entire mouth instantly and snidely remained in my mouth despite copious rinsing with Coke and more, erm, antiseptic beverages. I've never tasted anything like it, so my only benchmark to describe it is evil. If racism or global warming had a flavour, that would be it - something so viscerally cruel that it threatens to stomp out even the possibility of ever sampling anything tasty again. For several minutes I was genuinely frightened that my tastebuds would reject all food forevermore. Evil.

It passed, but my loathing for ingesting insects has not. I used to say "No thanks" - now it'll be a principled, vehement "Never again."