AAIIIAIIAIIIAIIAIIAIIAIAIIAIIAAAAHHHH!!!!!!!!!!

How do they taste?

And here's me wasting my time going out and buying the damned things.

Aha. From Wikipedia: The coconut crab is eaten by the Pacific islanders, and is considered a delicacy and an aphrodisiac, with a taste similar to lobster and crabmeat.

Bring 'em on.

a taste similar to lobster and crabmeat

Odd...

Odd...

They might have tasted something like tarantula.

That looks like something out of an Alien movie. Therefore, it screams to be boiled and eaten with garlic, butter, bullets, lemon, slime and a lovely chardonnay.

"The practice of using them as a foodstuff started in the years of terror under the Khmer Rouge. Across Cambodia starvation was rife and people ate anything they could get their hands on, including insects. When Pol Pot's murderous regime came to an end, most Cambodians were happy to stop eating bugs, but the Skuonese decided that they'd developed rather a taste for the local tarantulas."

Damn, that's... something.

I can't be the only one wanting to Photoshop in a thought balloon saying "Here, kitty, kitty, kitty..."

OTOH, this does maintain Apostropher's dominance atop the category "Blogs Most Likely to Make Me Say 'Oh, Sweet Christ!' When I Visit."

7: One theory for the reason the Chinese have so many crazy "delicacies" (e.g. interwoven strands of salivary laminae cement soup, sea "cucumber", etcetera) is that during the periodic famines, people would eat anything, and then later in more prosperous times, when the local nobility craved something "new", cooks would dredge up the unpleasant memories, slap a nice garnish on it, and charge the rich folk extra for the privelege. The recent wave of prosperity there has now greatly increased the number of suckers for that kind of thing.

My first real job was working in a high-end restaurant and the best line cook there was this perpetually stoned Mexican guy named Oscar. He used to say, as he was putting the finishing touches on plates, "Man, you charge enough for it, white people'll eat anything!" I think this is true cubed in modern China.

9: Except that the jellyfish, chicken feet, duck tongues, and sea cucumber I see being eaten at dim sum are cheap, and it sure as hell isn't the white people that are eating it.

10: Many have been commodified, sure, which puts lots of pressure on rare plant and animal species which can't keep up with the demand. Sharks, or more specifically their fins, for example.

And in my last sentence in 9, I didn't mean that white people are eating that stuff, I meant that in China, Chinese people will eat anything if you charge enough for it (or call it a rare delicacy, or claim it's an aphrodesiac).

This guy's big.