I THINK it was Chairman Mao who once said that Chinese people should be prepared to eat any creature that walks, crawls, flies or swims - humans excepted.

To our western sensibilities, this may seem rather distasteful, especially in relation to the crawlie things.

However, he had a point of sorts. When he came up with his all-consuming notion, Mao Tse Tung fully recognised that his countryfolk couldn’t afford to be picky with food when there were so many mouths to feed.

Hence their fondness for such dishes as birds nest soup, which is apparently made from bird spit, and what appears to be a favourite Chinese breakfast item, chicken’s feet.

Now, I’ve not experienced the pleasure or otherwise of the former, but I did encounter the latter after being invited to have Sunday breakfast with a Chinese family while staying in Malaysia a few years ago.

I cannot remember too much about the meal, save to say it was as far removed from a full English as you could get.

The main dish that stuck in my mind as well as my teeth was the chickens’ feet. (Yes, the apostrophe is in the right place - there were dozens of them.) To the Malaysian Chinese, they make delightful dish but I reckon eating them is hardly worth the effort for the little amount of meat you get from gnawing between the bones of the feet. And the look of them is hardly appetising.

During my Malaysian trip I was treated, as a guest of several local families, to some wierd and wonderful cuisine. But the two most exotic dishes I have to confess enjoying were panther meat - yes, real big cat-type panther - and fruit-eating civet cat, which were served up during a visit to a specially licensed jungle restaurant.

Chickens’ feet apart, I’m not a fussy eater, unlike one of my cousins who once refused a tongue sandwich on the grounds that he couldn’t bring himself to eat anything that came out of the mouth of an animal “I’d much rather have an egg,” he insisted.