Among those strange things are finger-sized larvae of giant dragonflies, which are mixed with eggs as omelets in southern China, and Watson says he found it to be nutritious and "very tasty."

"You just have to destroy your own prejudices," he says.

Bound for Paris in the spring, Watson is now learning how to order at meals in French.

"I want to learn as much as I can about Parisian society," he says. "Maybe I'll find some restaurant, maybe butcher shops, or vegetable sellers, or, my favorite, pastry chefs. I'll want to know how they become pastry chefs, what they have to learn, what kind of background they have, if they marry within the category of pastry makers... and I'll start by asking them how to make pastry."

An immensely popular elective for students of various academic backgrounds, "Food and Culture" is perhaps the only anthropology course many of the 106 students in the class would ever take, and for them Watson has a message.

"My agenda is to teach them to be sensitive about the world, to be sensitive about social groups and to attune themselves to focus in on the details of everyday life, in other words, anthropology," he says.

"About everything I talk about in this course is anthropology, but it's done through food," he adds. "You can think of food as lens that focuses your attention on social life, so you can learn about family, kinship, marriage, ethnicity, religion, etc."

According to Watson, this class is continually being expanded and enriched by student input, not only that of his graduate students, but that of undergraduates as well.

"It's just amazing to me how these undergraduates are able to find topics [for research papers] I've never even though of, and then I use them in my next year's teaching," he says. "In fact, my course work now has benefited a great deal from these papers my students have done."

Reciprocally, Watson wins praise from his students for both his lecturing and his student-friendly attitude.

"His lectures are well structured, interesting and easy to follow," Brobeil writes in an e-mail. "And his receptivity to student questions during lectures adds a sense of intimacy in a class which cannot really be considered small."