Nothing beats rats in their ability to ruin a restaurant’s business. Once word gets out, a restaurant’s profitable days could be numbered. They are also a popular topic for TV exposés and urban legends. This recent post on slashfood (Some Boston restaurants have rats too) also shows how a local rat problem could become a topic of interest in the blogosphere.

All this reminds me of an email I got a while back, about how some Chinese restaurants in the US are serving people rats disguised as fried chicken. Now all this may sound gross and far fetched, but all uncommon meats do taste like chicken (see here). And because the internet is the ultimate source of truth, I decided to do some very scientific research using it.

I found that people really do eat rats in some parts of the world. Most notable are in China where they are actually a delicacy. Poor people from Laos also use rats as a cheap source of protein. Also poor farm folks from my country, the Philippines, also eat farm rats. They even call them star meat because the letters of “rats” reversed spell out “star”.

I also found a web page version of the email I got about the rats as chicken meme. The pictures, as you can see, are really disturbing. But most people think this is nothing but urban legend. The gas canister are clearly marked as being in China, where in some parts people actually eat rats. So I believe these pictures are the work of some clever pranksters, putting unrelated pictures together to stir up disgust.

But in the end, none of this matters. People just eat different stuff around the world. Some people eat chicken, while other eat rats. Maybe in some parts of the world, chicken are said to taste like rats.

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