I went recently to Vittel in the French Vosges for their Foire aux Grenouilles, an extraordinary annual event that draws 20,000 frog gourmets for two days of more or less non-stop greasy nibbling on a sobering seven tonnes of frogs' legs, served in assorted sauces (garlic and parsley being the most popular) but also in tarts, tourtes, salads, croustillants, cassolets, and even on pizzas.
The French and frog consumption have been a joke in Britain since the 1500s, when the delicacy started being served in posh Paris restaurants. In fact they've been eating amphibians since at least the 11th century (frogs' legs were even briefly a hit in London, when Escoffier served them to the Prince of Wales at the Savoy in 1908).
It's inexplicable if you ask me: the meat is white, wet and insipid, with the texture of soft rubber. People say it tastes like a cross between fish and chicken; in fact it tastes like frog, cooked in whatever it's been cooked in.
But the point is that the frogs served up at Vittel, and elsewhere in France, are no longer French.
Alarmed at declining numbers, France banned all commercial frog harvesting in 1980. So almost all the frogs' legs eaten in France, which imports up to 4,000 tonnes of them a year, come deep-frozen from Indonesia.
What's more, the French may be the biggest, but they're far from being the only importers of frogs in the world. America buys almost as many. And a long way from the smart tables of western gourmets, frogs are a staple in many parts of Asia and south America.
As a result, earlier this year is was calculated that we may now be consuming as many as a billion frogs a year. Some of these may be farmed; frogs are farmed (or at least encouraged to breed), although generally on a small scale and with limited commercial success, in several Asian countries, but the vast majority are taken from the wild.
With a third of the world's amphibians now officially at risk from habitat destruction, climate change, pollution and disease, the burgeoning trade in frogs' legs for human consumption could easily tip some into extinction. Scientists like Corey Bradshaw fear that with no attempt at comprehensive data collection - and still less at managing rapidly-depleting stocks - we could be doing to some frogs exactly what we did to cod in the North Atlantic: eating them to death. So is there now any justification for eating frogs at all?
