Our Daily Bread

Korean Father developed diabetes a few years ago, and has to be careful with his diet. It seems that in Korea, if not more widely in Asia, there is something which is believed to greatly help in the fight against this condition. Silkworm - or '누에' (nue) in Korean.

Now while this might sound like the basis of one of those Chinese medicines based on long-standing belief rather than science, there has at least been some serious research undertaken into the subject. So, sections of the Korean diabetic community are munching away on dried silkworm taken with a kind of yoghurt, or just washed down with milk. But there is another, perhaps easier, solution - silkworm bread, which as you might expect, is bread baked with powdered silkworm as an ingredient.

Of course, it's not the sort of thing you can pick up at your local mini-mart or Tesco (although powdered silkworm apparently is fairly easy to come by), but this being Korea there are Silkworm Internet bakeries ready to fulfil your order. So we've 'subscribed' - at a price of 80,000 won (about £43) for silkworm bread deliveries to be sent to Korean Father, who is still down in Namhae, once a week for five weeks, after which we can renew the subscription. Each pack has six boxes with six silkworm bread rolls - which strikes me as being a lot of bread to consume by any measure, even if it is for medicinal purposes, and I can see he might have to be joining us at the gym when he returns. While he's eaten silkworm powder before, this will be the first time he's had the bread so we'll have to see whether he thinks it's effective - his blood-sugar testing kit should reveal all.