Book Review : Extreme Cuisine - Jerry Hopkins***** The question you need to answer for yourself is, are you a neophile, or a neophobe ? That is, do you seek out the new and different, or do you fear and shun it ? In a culinary sense, I'd hope to place myself amongst the neophiles, I've always thought that there is very little that I wouldn't eat, no matter how strange it was. Jerry Hopkins excellent exploration of the world's stranger cuisines seeks to challenge these presumptions. Extreme Cuisine could so easily have fallen into the lads mag trap of over simplification and base shock and horror, but Hopkins' book is well researched and all the foods contained within are given a sympathetic tasting (the author has devoured almost every item in the book) and description, there is a brief but informative historical background for each foodstuff, notes on present day production methods and suppliers if appropriate, and a few recipes for those folk hardy enough to want to try their hand at cooking camel, jellyfish, sea slug or roasted crickets. What wouldn't I eat then ? Most of the stuff contained in this book I'd have a go at, bats, rats, mice and guinea pigs, yes, no problem. Jellyfish, I think I could, slugs, well, maybe, ants, bees, wasps, caterpillars, I think I could force myself, but there are two things in here which I think wouldn't pass my lips even at gunpoint. Fried spiders, oh the horror. I really don't think I could chew on a crunchy, hairy, fried tarantula. There is a worse horror within these pages though, balut..... This is a 16-18 day old fertilised duck egg, first you make a small hole in the end and suck out the juices, then you chip away the shell to reveal the chick embryo inside and eat the lot. Apparently it has the texture of cooked egg white and a flavour not unlike duck liver, but I think I'm never going to find out if that's true. Extreme Cuisine is a great book, packed full of the weird and wonderful foods from around the globe, weird to us Westerners perhaps, quite everyday and banal to the inhabitants of other countries. Things that might seem normal to us can be viewed by others as strange, unusual or horrific. Once at my parent's house we had some Chinese guests over for dinner, and after dinner, as we Brits do, a cheeseboard was served. The guests looked on in trepidation, they sampled tiny portions of cheddar, and then one brave soul put a small piece of stilton in her mouth, she looked appalled and ran from the table to the bathroom. Our guests found it difficult to believe that anyone could possibly eat something so obviously vile as rotting cheese.