Although there have been other books--including cookbooks--published about bugs as food, I believe this is the first art photography book to tackle the subject.

For eight years, husband and wife team Peter Menzel and Faith D'Aluisio have traveled the globe, photographing people eating insects, talking with locals, and--like the gonzo anthropologists they are--actually partaking of the crawling cuisine.

Menzel writes, "Our view of the culinary potential of invertebrates broadened as we ate raw scorpion in China, roasted grubs in Australia, stir-friend dragonflies in Indonesia, tarantulas on a stick in Cambodia, and live termites in Botswana."

Starting with a woman tearing into a deep-fried tarantula on the book's cover and a close-up of a marinated grasshopper between someone's teeth on the title page, Man Eating Bugs contains over 170 color photographs, many of which are printed full-page or as two-page, full-bleed spreads. The pictures fall into roughly four categories: a minority of shots of people, sans insects, from the thirteen countries covered; shots of the creepy-crawlies in their natural habitats; photos of the bugs on their way to being someone's meal; and shots of people chowing down. While some of the photos have a utilitarian documentary feel to them, most of them are arranged in a way that gives them visual/artistic appeal.

Using smart prose, the authors mix hard entomophagical fact with their own experiences. After digging up witchetty grubs (which look like "a living, squirming, pasty-white piece of fat," according to D'Aluisio) with Aborigines in the Australian outback, Menzel describes eating the roasted critters: "I'm amazed: The worm's skin is crispy and light; the flesh is creamy and delicate. Witchetty grub tastes like nut-flavored scrambled eggs and mild mozzarella, wrapped in a phyllo dough pastry." Mmmm, I'm hungry now.