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food / travel

Extreme Fooding: A Visitor From Laos Compares His Nation's Exotic Eats To China's

Cobras and scorpions, centipedes and seahorses on bamboo sticks are among the things you never thought you'd taste. A Laotian in Beijing compares two of the world's more "out there" eating experiences.

Wangfujing night market in the center of Beijing
Wangfujing night market in the center of Beijing
Souksakhone Vaenkeo

BEIJING -Coming from a country where some people eat poisonous cobra, centipedes and toads, and having heard that the Chinese eat everything that flies except airplanes, everything with four legs except tables and everything that swims except submarines, I wanted to establish who eats stranger food, the Lao or the Chinese?

Wandering around Wangfujing night market in the center of Beijing, I was amazed by the odd creatures that people were eating. Street sellers were selling things that people would normally never want in their mouths. They were tempting tourists with barbecued scorpions and centipedes on sticks.

Although we Lao also eat poisonous insects, they're not that common since it's only the elderly who know how to prepare them. Even so, there are communities in Laos that add insects to their bottles of rice wine believing, despite the lack of evidence, that the alcohol is good for them.

They also flavor their rice wine with herbs, wild animals' bile, or a mix of poisonous animals like cobras, centipedes and scorpions.

Personally, I've never tried these strange foods, but my friend Phonsavanh Sangsomboun, who used to eat cobra salad, told me that such concoctions are popular with the elderly people in his central Laos hometown.

I'll have the cobra salad

The people believed that toxins from different poisonous animals will eliminate poison itself. "But I never drink that kind of alcohol since I am still young. It's a drink for old people, but I did used to eat cobra salad," my friend said.

He said that cobra, wasn't as tasty as the non-poisonous snakes. My uncle even says that he eats cobra salad to relieve pain in his muscles. It's a skill to cook these strange foods; in order to cook cobra salad, for example, you need to remove the poison.

Bile-infused spirits and cobra salads aren't exactly on sale in the shops. The alcohol is a more welcoming gift that Lao offer to visitors.

For those unfamiliar with Indochinese cuisine, Wangfujing's scorpions, centipedes and seahorses on bamboo sticks must seem extraordinary.

"We never eat seahorses. We only put dry ones inside our house because they're believed to bring us good luck. Some jewelry shop owner put them inside their shops because they're supposed to bring in customers," said my shocked Filipino colleague Darwin Wally T. Wee.

And the starfish? "In our place, only kids play with them. We'd never eat them."

Read the original article in The Economic Observer

Photo - Urban Capture

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Future

AI Is Good For Education — And Bad For Teachers Who Teach Like Machines

Despite fears of AI upending the education and the teaching profession, artificial education will be an extremely valuable tool to free up teachers from rote exercises to focus on the uniquely humanistic part of learning.

Journalism teacher and his students in University of Barcelona.

Journalism students at the Blanquerna University of Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain.

© Sergi Reboredo via ZUMA press
Julián de Zubiría Samper

-Analysis-

BOGOTÁ - Early in 2023, Microsoft tycoon Bill Gates included teaching among the professions most threatened by Artificial Intelligence (AI), arguing that a robot could, in principle, instruct as well as any school-teacher. While Gates is an undoubted expert in his field, one wonders how much he knows about teaching.

As an avowed believer in using technology to improve student results, Gates has argued for teachers to use more tech in classrooms, and to cut class sizes. But schools and countries that have followed his advice, pumping money into technology at school, or students who completed secondary schooling with the backing of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation have not attained the superlative results expected of the Gates recipe.

Thankfully, he had enough sense to add some nuance to his views, instead suggesting changes to teacher training that he believes could improve school results.

I agree with his view that AI can be a big and positive contributor to schooling. Certainly, technological changes prompt unease and today, something tremendous must be afoot if a leading AI developer, Geoffrey Hinton, has warned of its threat to people and society.

But this isn't the first innovation to upset people. Over 2,000 years ago, the philosopher Socrates wondered, in the Platonic dialogue Phaedrus, whether reading and writing wouldn't curb people's ability to reflect and remember. Writing might lead them to despise memory, he observed. In the 18th and 19th centuries, English craftsmen feared the machines of the Industrial Revolution would destroy their professions, producing lesser-quality items faster, and cheaper.

Their fears were not entirely unfounded, but it did not happen quite as they predicted. Many jobs disappeared, but others emerged and the majority of jobs evolved. Machines caused a fundamental restructuring of labor at the time, and today, AI will likely do the same with the modern workplace.

Many predicted that television, computers and online teaching would replace teachers, which has yet to happen. In recent decades, teachers have banned students from using calculators to do sums, insisting on teaching arithmetic the old way. It is the same dry and mechanical approach to teaching which now wants to keep AI out of the classroom.

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