Lao Voices

For a foreigner to Laos, finding strange creatures at a local market can be quite an adventure. For the local people, food is food. It seems there is an unspoken norm in Laos and many countries in Asia that “anything that moves is edible” and you can see the evidence of this at the local market.

Most kids in Laos would know where to find food for their family. My cousin Mo told me how he used to dig for crickets and catch grasshopper for grilling. Even my siblings and I used to catch grasshoppers in Laos so we can grill them. When we came to the US our parents sent us out to catch some grasshoppers in a field in Kansas the first summer. Then we found out the grasshoppers in the US were not as edible as we thought.