manage

WeirdMeat.com is based in Shanghai, China, and documents experiences eating strange food, as I travel around China and the world. What is weird food to one, is normal to another. I want to find out why. Includes articles, travel stories, photos.

I ordered some bugs to eat from this UK-based company called Edible Unique. They came shipped in a white envelope, to my office in Shanghai. So many bugs to choose from! We went down to our favorite spot on the Bund, our friend Jeff's dive bar I Love Shanghai [recently moved to new location]. Let him decide. Here's how it went...

Jeff made a blind choice for the crickets. Then, we ate

We're happy to see that everyone's gone green these days. Can't open any magazine or newspaper these days without articles and adverts pimping green this and green that. One of the aspects of all this greenness that is often over-looked is in food production. Meats like beef and pork and chicken can be inefficient and environmentally nasty. A lot of people, my former self included, turn to a

This week, a man from Oregon, which is somewhere in California, I think, broke his ankle while mountain climbing, and was missing for several days. He survived by eating centipedes! And water from creeks.

Photo from University of Nebraska

That's totally awesome. I love to hear nature survival stories like that. I have a few of my own, which I'll get around to sharing one of these days.

Mountain Ant Essence @ Oxygen Bar, San Francisco.

In the late 1990's we lived in the Mission District in San Francisco. This mostly Latino neighborhood (some claim it's the true birthplace of the burrito, as we know it) saw a period of gentrification and hipster-ism coinciding with the dot-com gold rush of the time. We had mixed feelings about this, but the diversity of people it drew, and the

We recently passed a shop in Shanghai, China that had a poster advertising ant essence. We went in to grab some and found the shop was actually an adult sex toy shop. There are lots of these all over Shanghai. They have fake viagra, exotic condoms, dildos, rubber boobies, blow-up dolls, and other plastic genitalia. Yeah, there's some really weird stuff in there. There's also tons of pills

... some alley off Sukhumvit, Bangkok, Thailand

The Sukhumvit area of Bangkok is a paradise for the amateur adventure eater. From weird, unidentifiable bugs served by multi-gendered street vendors, to odd goat parts in strictly halal restaurants, and even a condom restaurant. We'd already eaten all the insects we could find, and after a few shots of various exotic liquors, we found a soup

Oh here's a fun story... over the weekend in Jiaxing, Zhejiang Province (a few hours south of Shanghai), a bunch of cat lovers rescued 800 kittens that were going to be sent down to Guangdong (where they eat all that weird stuff). Supposedly these cats were meant to be eaten too.

Shanghai Animal Protection Association President Zhang Yi appealed to society to cultivate better dining habits. [

[Photo from TrekEarth]

During the 1988 Olympics in Seoul, Korea, the government banned some restaurants from serving dog meat and encouraged Koreans to not eat dog when around foreign visitors. There was a lot of hoopla surrounding this, with anti-dog meat organizations rallying and "Korean culture" supporters defending their right to eat dog meat. It's important to note that there were

Taipei, Taiwan (and, unfortunately, other places too).

Two girls, one toilet

This could go under "Stupid Food Products" but it deserves its own post...

There is a restaurant -- a chain of them, heaven help us -- that serves food in toilets. It's called Modern Toilet and it's poopular with teenage girls. I was wandering about Ximending shopping area in Taipei, near the "American Street" (

Confession: Sometimes even I have trouble stomaching this stuff... well... of course, I was hungover again.

Taipei, Taiwan

We were looking for the infamous Snake Alley night market in Taibei, when I spotted a tray of gross looking balls. We weren't sure what they were at first, but the thin veins and tight plump shape hinted that they weren't just a stomach or kidney. We asked...