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Photographer’s Note

My secret training began as a child, at an English boarding school. 1 realise that few readers will truly appreciate the significance of this, but survival depended heavily on being able to eat, for weeks at a time, a food regime that was modelled loosely on that of Victorian prisons. A cartoonist called Ronald Searle once produced a book about these very English institutions, and to my mind no-one has bettered his description of school dinner as “the piece of cod which passeth all understanding.” There can no finer education of the palate to accept the impossible than the one I and my fellow inmates received, and for that I am, as was intoned before each meal, “truly grateful.”

As a photographer, I put my catholic tastes to work and began, many years ago, shooting the weird culinary habits that I came across. Much of this was in Asia, not only because the region became something of a speciality of mine, but because the southern Chinese and their neighbours, particularly in Thailand, Laos and Vietnam, have a greater fascination with unusual foods than any other culture I know. So where more appropriate should I meet Jerry for the first time than in Bangkok, where we found that we shared many of the same tastes.

With very few exceptions, I ate what you see photographed here. Keeping or consuming the props, I should explain, is considered one of the perks of photography, and where a fashion photographer might get the clothes at the end of the shoot (or the model if lucky), I would be left with the gooey parts. Yes, that includes the rats and the bats and the buffalo’s penis-two-and-a-half feet, by the way, when flaccid. My only regret is that the publisher excised some of the best bits on the grounds of common decency. Surely you wouldn’t have been offended by the breakfast of raw chopped dog, flavoured with its bile? On second thought, perhaps you would.

One of the oldest Eskimo groups, the Ostiaks, are pictured here eating raw reindeer meat off the bone, a delicacy not usually enjoyed by these people.