Word: tongchart
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Dates: during 2001-2001
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...When Tongchart Nusu, a food distributor in Phitsanulok, Thailand, yanks open the heavy steel door of his cold-storage locker, you get the expected burst of snowy frost?along with a moist, overpowering, rancid stench. Nostrils flaring, Tongchart draws the mist into his lungs, this sweet aroma of hard work, money, success: the odor of bugs...
...Tongchart's freezer holds 10 tons of boiled and freeze-dried giant water bugs, dung beetles, grasshoppers and a fine assortment of succulent worms. The 40-year-old former butcher and noodle salesman is president of United Insects of Phitsanulok, and that, he says, makes him the king bee in Thailand's estimated $50 million-a-year edible bug industry. "Business is so good that I don't have to deliver," he says. "If you want bugs, you come...
...flavors are like nothing you've ever tasted," says Nusara Thaitawat, a former journalist and the author of Cuisine of Cambodia. And the business is creating a chain of modest wealth for farmers and sellers, making insects a commodity distributed across Thailand as efficiently as, say, artichokes in California. Tongchart supplies wholesalers as far north as Chiang Rai and as far south as Hat Yai. Some of them, in turn, are exporting to places like Hong Kong, Japan and Taiwan. The meat and potatoes, so to speak, of the insect biz are grasshoppers, beetles and bamboo worms. Some delectables, such...
...market is ready. When Tongdaeng's crickets are big enough to eat, he gathers them up and delivers them to "bug king" Tongchart. With business still brisk, there is always room for more in his malodorous freezer. And Tongchart is already dreaming up new ventures, like canning bugs and exporting them to new markets. Maybe even to Europe or America. Maybe. Or maybe that is better left as food for thought...
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