When I was a kid, my family used to go to a Chinese restaurant that specialized in serving live seafood. Every visit was a highlight of the week, or the month, as circumstances dictated. Staring at the tanks of live grouper, eels, shrimp, mantis, rock lobster, mollusks, crab; it was a diverse bounty of tropical critters found off the coasts of the Philippines. I would sit there fascinated by the alien, and at times disturbing, mouths of crustaceans; the spitting manila clams; the writhing, intertwined mass of eels.