Chinese Tucker trials...

How about another section from my book? I had been tracking down a famous food market in Beijing without much success and then, by more luck than judgement I find it...

.... An hour later I arrive, via a narrow alley that doesn't exist on my guidebook map. Donghuamen market is actually a street of about seventy stalls. Each stall is covered in a red and white striped awning. Nothing unusual in that I hear you say. Well no. The interesting stuff is the produce underneath them, because this food market specializes in ingredients that westerners would normally bludgeon with the heal of a stout shoe.

The first stall I look at is typical. In fact, its pretty much repeated all the way along the row. There are a few things that are obvious. Scorpions piled next to mountains of ants. Skewered grasshoppers, deep fried frogs, although some of these have lost their original shape due to the cooking fat partially melting them. Other items look like the contents of an autopsy bucket and are, I suspect, the internal organs of larger species. I walk up for a closer inspection.

'You try this,' the stallholder says, offering me a worm impaled on a tooth pick. He's large and fat, not unlike the worm. I pull it off its spear with my teeth and bite. It's been deep fried, and to be honest, the overwhelming taste I get is garlic and ginger. I open my mouth to show him it's gone. He laughs a very high-pitched laugh, like he's been sucking helium.

'Ha, ha, ok, where you from?'

'England.'

'You have this in England?' He produces a small handful of ants in his podgy palm.

'Ants?' I say. 'We love them.' I scoop them off his hand and munch them down - easy. I notice, as does the stallholder that I'm starting to draw a crowd of extremely interested Chinese. It’s like having five million people to dinner but on the upside I'm getting fed for free.

My new best friend says something to the crowd and they all burst out laughing. He then offers me a water cockroach. I'm struck by the silence as I push it in. The texture is disgusting and the wings give way almost immediately. I then bite down into the body. If you want to know what it tastes like ask a teenager if you can chew on the cluster of whiteheads on his chin. However, I am conscious of the fact I am representing the UK now and manage to turn my gag into a gentle cough, which I follow up with a smile.

'Ha, Ha, England, you Chinese man!' He translates for the growing crowd and they clap. Honestly, they clap. I contemplate a bow, but I don't have time. He moves on to a jar of bile, from which he ladles a small spoonful into a plastic bowl. A hush falls over the crowd and his employees stop serving. Its so viscous I struggle to keep it on the spoon, so in the end I just upend the bowl and let it slide down. It's like blowing my nose backwards. The taste is hard to describe but here goes. Run three hundred miles in the same pair of pants. Cut out the crutch section. Soak that in paraffin and bury it in a dung heap until flies have eaten the dung. Retrieve the cloth and boil it in the putrefied remains of a dozen skunks. Add pepper to taste. It made it as far as my tonsils before it came back with the velocity of a discharging shotgun cartridge. The cockroach and scorpion followed it, but curiously not the worm or the ants. The crowd burst into spontaneous laughter.

'Ha, ha, not Chinese man!' my fat friend shouts and then repeats for the crowd.

He hands me over half a dozen dumplings, which I eye suspiciously.

'This you can eat England.'

Its pork, and delicious. He refuses my offer to pay and waves me off. The crowd I've pulled is sufficient reward and he and his employees sets about serving them, still laughing at my pathetically weak Western stomach.

if I'd been better prepared I could got revenge by force feeding them some of those £1 meals from Iceland...