Shark's Fin and Sichuan Pepper

Great read as a travel book and a delicious read as a cookbook. I would be driven insane if I had to read this anywhere further than 10 kilometres from a decent Asian market.

By the sixth or seventh chapter, it all blended together. She ate another exotic dish and she had some moral ambiguities about what she ate or who she ate it from. I didn't finish, but each chapter would work well as an essay, even if it doesn't work as a book.

Fuchsia lived in China off and on for about ten years. She entered China as a journalist and left intrigued with its cuisine. And what a cuisine? Is there anything they don't eat in China? I honestly cannot imagine getting all googly-eyed over snapping off and crunching on rabbit heads. Ick. And bladders? Eek. Dunlop's final confrontation is with a caterpillar crawling on a leaf in her garden at home in England. I hope I'm not giving anything away when I tell you that she plucked the caterpillar off the leaf and popped it in her mouth and regarded the entire affair as a triumph of her new eating sensibilities. Sorry, but I must comment with a final yuck.