Exotic Forms of Asian Food on the Market

Got the travel bug?

If you go to Jomtien on the fringes of the Thai beach town of Pattaya, you may run into the ‘bugmobile’ shop. Run by an entrepreneur with a gypsy look, the bugmobile is attached to a motorbike. Its stock consists of chunky worms reminiscent of Aussie witchety grubs, cockroach lookalikes and more. Just to make the stall more surreal, the bug man bangs a drum kit built into it. So, you get to hear the vendor’s Keith Moon solo as you chew through a centipede. Unique.

Find out more about insect snacks and other gross, sorry, exotic forms of Asian food on the market.

1. Bug crunch

For most people around the world, eating bugs is an entirely natural part of the menu. For instance, the Japanese have a yen for aquatic fly larvae sautéed in sugar and soy sauce. Bali residents go for de-winged dragonflies boiled in coconut milk with ginger and garlic, which seems destructive when you look at the creatures’ lovely stained-glass-style wings.

2. Baby food

The Filipino delicacy balut consists of a fertilized mallard duck or chicken egg with a nearly-developed embryo inside. The embryo is boiled and eaten in the shell. Filipinos are highly hospitable, so don’t you dare fail to show appreciation for balut. Say: 'Ang Sarap' (Tagalog for “It’s delicious”). You know balut is.

3. Eastern cheese

The name says it all. Stinky tofu or chòu dòufu is a kind of fermented tofu that reeks. Popular in East and Southeast Asia, particularly mainland China, Taiwan and Hong Kong, stinky tofu is usually homemade. It gets everywhere: night markets, roadside stands, lunch bars. Its color ranges from the golden fried Zhejiang-style to the black typical of Hunan-style stinky tofu. You can eat stinky tofu cold, steamed, stewed, or – as most people do — fried. Really, it should be annihilated. Stinky tofu is utterly disgusting.

4. The raw prawn

Drunken shrimp crops up in China. The dish sounds nice. Who is not partial to the occasional prawn cocktail or curry? Alas, these prawns 'cooked' in booze are alive. Picture them wriggling as they slither down your throat.

5. Sewage fruit

Hedgehog-skinned, fleshy centred durians may seem a strange choice in a round-up of horrible food. To some consumers, durians taste pleasantly sweet. To others, they taste vile – like emulsion paint mixed with mildew. Celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain has said that durian makes your breath, ‘smell as if you'd been French-kissing your dead grandmother’. Because of their stench, durians are banned from some shopping centers and public transport.

6. Tickle torture

Other dodgy Asian foods include lamb’s brains and ant eggs, but just cannot compete in the grossness stakes with tarantula. Yes, tarantula. Cambodians are fond of the spectacularly hairy creature, which is hard enough for most people to look at, let alone eat. The tarantula’s inclusion on the Cambodian menu dates back to the Khmer Rouge, whose regime sparked a famine. So people ate whatever they could, including tarantula. Distant crab cousins, tarantulas are crispy on the outside and gooey in the middle. Tarantula meat tastes like a cross between cod and chicken. Yum.

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