Bangkoks krabbelnde Delikatessen (360° - GEO Reportage)

Bangkok's Patpong entertainment district at night: Neon signs flash brightly, loud music blares from the bars. The sidewalks are bustling with night owls, young prostitutes with their foreign clients, tourists, and tuk-tuk drivers taking a short break. Mobile food stalls and snack bars offer fragrant delicacies on every street corner. San Supathanakun's snacks are also very popular: On her cart, lined up in small tin bowls, are fried grasshoppers, water beetles, ant salad, white silkworms in plastic bags, and crunchy black scorpions. 360° - GEO Reportage shows a resolute woman who has taken her destiny into her own hands with her creepy-crawly delicacies. A film by Matthias Heeder and Monika Hielscher © 2007, licensed by MedienKontor / ARTE Season 8 - Episode 21 Subscribe to wocomoTRAVEL: https://goo.gl/tIk2Qc Follow us on Facebook:   / wocomo   Press release: "When I fry this grasshopper, it turns reddish and tastes very crispy. Customers like that," says San Supathanakun. Food sizzles, fries, and deep-fries in the small square in front of the residential barracks, right next to a four-lane main road. Cars, mopeds, and tuk-tuks jostle each other through Bangkok. Around 14 million people live here, and the population is constantly growing. Many come from the desperately poor northeast of Thailand – like the virtuoso 35-year-old cook San. She arrived five years ago with a unique business idea: selling delicious insect snacks on the streets of Bangkok. Insects are gaining popularity in Thailand. But San's main customers are young women from her rural homeland who, often lacking education, earn their living through prostitution in Bangkok's Patpong entertainment district. The insect snacks remind the girls of home. With her earnings, San can support her entire extended family and pay off the loan for a house in her home village. However, this meant leaving her young daughter behind – and she works almost without a break every day. Even at three in the morning, she's still not off work, then she goes shopping at the Klong Toey market in the south of the city. Here, she finds a variety of goods, spices, vegetables, and, above all, a wide range of insects. Her supplier usually sources his produce from neighboring Cambodia. At the border crossing, tons of live insects like grasshoppers, silkworms, and water beetles are trucked in. San barely manages to sleep more than four hours a night. And time and again, the monsoon rains flood her shack and the area in front of it—but she has the firm will to keep going. “I just have to take a step back, see where I stand, and figure out how I can move forward.”