Meet the Mekong rat, a delicacy of the eponymous delta in the southern part of the country. The Vietnamese and their southeast Asian brethren have been eating rats for time immemorial, particularly in rural areas. But it's relatively recently bigger cities are starting to get in on the act, enjoying both Mekong rats and general field variety. One recent report linked the increase of this urban eating proclivity to a need for protein after the bird flu scare. But is a rat a rat in southeast Asia? And by that I mean, is a rat the same rat that we see scurrying around eek'ed out strap-hangers on the subway platform, a scampering symbol of all that is abhorred in our world? A metaphor for the places we fear the most, where we least want to get caught, where only rodents (and their partners in grime, cockroaches) dare go?

Not really. Like other southeast Asians, the Vietnamese are fiercely omnivorous eaters. They don't waste many animals and plants and they don't waste much of the plant or animal. Which is a good thing, right? If you're going to sacrifice the life of a living thing for food, why throw out part of it? It's probably something the West will never be able to fully endorse. At least not until we're all speaking Chinese.

So, not wanting to waste this rat, I dug in. I picked up the entire fried-to-rigor-mortis carcass with both hands and sunk into the back leg, where I detected the most meat. The meat was dark and offered just a hint of gaminess. Like eating pigeon--"rats with wings," as they're often referred to, coincidentally--there were too many tiny bones and not enough meat to really enjoy it. I did my best and actually ate most of it. Afterward, I found it hard to imagine there will be connoisseurs of rat meat, that they'll be anything more than a necessity when a fowl-induced plague arises.

But plague or no plague, I finally figured out when a rat is not a rat: when you can order it in a restaurant and eat it.