Food menus at restaurants can be as interesting a thing to read as a mystery novel. There is an array of clues for you - in terms of ingredients, preparation and cuisine - to help you deduce what your dish will taste like. But for an intrepid epicurean and self-proclaimed nerd like Vivek Singh, who is the subject of a new book written by his wife Divya Anand, menus are a lesson in biology. "When I look at menus, what instinctively comes to my mind is where that food is placed on the 'animal kingdom' chart," he says in a telephonic interview from Bengaluru.

Anand, a vegetarian, knew of her husband's crazy obsession with food, when they began seeing each other. "One day, he sent me an email with no subject line and just an image attached," she writes in her book. The image was the same animal chart, he now tells us about. "On one side there were invertebrates classified into molluscs, crustaceans...on the other side, the vertebrates were broken into Pisces and mammals." That was Singh's progress report. "It's what I have eaten so far," he had told her. Anand knew right then that her kitchen was going to be a science lab of sorts, and that no travel plans together would be complete without scouring for strange animals to eat.