When I was in Japan many years ago with a group of American journalists, I was challenged to drink a glass of water with a live eel in it, and did, sensing it wriggle down my throat, feeling like a Samurai who didn’t back down.

When I was in China in 2009 with a group of European Union journalists, however, I passed on the live scorpions on a stick which, like lobsters, were then dipped into boiling oil – but later I did eat from a bowl of fried bees.

Yet I won’t eat blight, those greens that look like boiled grass and many Greeks savor and devour, nor Brussels sprouts or artichokes. I stopped eating lobster – tough for a Bostonian – because they are cooked alive to lessen the chance of producing toxins.

The sellers will tell you they don’t feel any pain but they’re not twitching their tails and banging their claws on the side of the pot in joy, so that was it for me and while I can’t resist cheeseburgers I try not to think of what puts them on the table.

In the film version of Elmore Leonard’s great western novel ‘Hombre’, Paul Newman’s character – a white man raised by Apaches – is riding in a stagecoach with the uppity wife of a white Indian agent bureaucrat – who asks him if it’s true Indians eat dog and that she never would. “You’d eat it. You’d fight for the bones, too,” says Newman’s character.

One man’s meat is another man’s poison, and I know Greeks who can’t stand the taste, or even the sight of feta, but the idea of eating songbirds that’s a delicacy on Cyprus, even more than unmeltable halloumi cheese, is anathema.

The birds are captured and killed by poachers, including on a United Kingdom military base, and while the practice is unlawful it’s allowed to continue despite occasional phony crackdowns because any President who prevents it will find himself on the menu next and there’s too many votes to be lost.

The Cypriots call the dish made from the birds ‘Ambelopoulia’ and you can find it in plenty of restaurants whose owners know there’s no consequences for serving a food that’s supposedly outlawed, including protected migratory birds.

The French eat a songbird species called Ortolan, and customarily this is usually done by the diners covering their heads with a large napkin to hide the decadent and disgraceful act, but then again the French love snails and I’d be slow to warm to those.

Eating ortolans is unlawful in France, but some chefs consider them a rare and exotic dish – then again if people would eat them and it would be expensive a lot of restaurants would put komodo dragon on the menu.

A single ortolan bird is no bigger than a baby’s fist and weighs less than 28 grams (1 ounces), but can be sold for as much as $185 – sometimes $2,960 a pound – to those willing to break the law.

“This is a cry from the heart,” said Michel Guérard, one of the inventors of Nouvelle Cuisine, who wants to serve the dish for one day or one weekend of the year, said Financial Review – and he’s not alone.

On Cyprus, the songbirds reportedly sell for the equivalent of $5 each so there’s a lot of money to be made capturing them, which is usually done with fine-mesh fishing nets strung between trees or putting glue sticks on branches to catch them.

Repeated attempts to stop the slaughter of songbirds on Cyprus have failed, a new report finding more than 435,000 more were killed in the autumn of 2023, the period of the year when they’re considered at their fattest and tastiest.

That was published by BirdLife Cyprus and supported by the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) and the Committee Against Bird Slaughter (CABS) said that was an increase of 90,000 from the previous year.

Twenty years ago, over two million birds were being unlawfully caught every year and more than 10 million birds were trapped in the 1990s.

Since then, Cypriot law enforcement authorities have worked with BirdLife Cyprus, CABS, and the RSPB, which has led to a massive reduction in the number of traps being detected and birds being killed, said BBC Wildlife, unless you count the 435,000 already eaten.

In the autumn of 2023, the work of the anti-poaching unit of the British military base in Cyprus was scaled back, which the report believes was a significant factor behind the increase in the number of birds being killed.

“Illegal bird trapping has become a demand-driven wildlife crime, with the trading of trapped birds in lawbreaking restaurants being the key economic driver for organized trappers,” the conservation groups said.

“For two decades our international partnership has shown that we can work together to tackle this criminal activity through direct action on the ground backed up by enforcement action. However, this autumn shows that more still needs to be done,” said Mark Thomas, head of RSPB investigations.

“We cannot allow the progress we have made to be undone and the shocking levels of songbird killings to return to the abhorrent levels we once saw. By working together we can make this a thing of the past,” he said. They won’t.

Yum yum. Pass the wings please.