Manjula goes blogging...

Banquet dinner at Kuala Lumpur was a very fine traditional Chinese meal of several courses. In addition to other delights, there was octopus on the menu, and the topic of conversation shifted briefly to strange things eaten. I promised Larisa I would blog my gastronomic stories, so here goes:

I think I was first initiated to strange, edible items when I joined the Madras Crocodile Bank in India after college. I suspect it was part of my education to be tough and unsqueamish in the field. We worked with and lived in the vicinity of the Irula tribe - traditional snake and rat catchers of southern India - and as a result my conservative palate was broadened to accept barbecued field mice, minced monitor lizard curry, and roasted termites. Around that time I was also introduced to frog legs (highly irregular in the Indian diet!) by a student from Oxford who was conducting his research on gut contents of a local species of Rana. The legs invariably ended up in the kitchen until the day he used a little too much chloroform on his frogs and dinner made us all very, very sleepy.

These introductions only whetted our appetite and our sense of adventure and we further expanded our list by diving off the south Indian coast to pick things off the rocks to cook. So, by the time I was launched into my first sea turtle project in the Nicobar Islands, I hardly winced when the Nicobari tribals offered me boiled fish covered with hundreds of little black crawling insects in a gesture of hospitality…