The man who eats live animals

Is Louis Cole's brand of stunt eating idiotic, pointless and embarrassingly laddish or a useful reminder that all of our food choices are based on culture and prejudice? A YouTube channel called Food for Louis reached 1m hits on one of its videos last week. Louis Cole is a shaggy-haired 28-year-old living in Roehampton, south west London. Since he started posting videos last May, Cole has filmed himself eating, among other things, 21 live locusts, a raw bull's heart, a turkey leg crawling with maggots (the "Christmas special", that one), a rotting dead frog , a "mouseshake" (10 dead mice blitzed in a blender), a large, live lizard from the Brazilian jungle, a live tarantula, live crayfish, live scorpion and, most controversially to judge by the "dislikes" and comments, "my pet goldfish". After the bush tucker trials of I'm a Celebrity, Bourdain with his balut, Bear Grylls and Fear Factor, the British public is now familiar with this kind of stunt eating. But Cole takes things rather further. I don't know which is worse: the dead lizard spasming as it pokes out of his mouth, the way he grips four tarantula legs in each hand before biting the creature's head off, the crayfish pinching his tongue, or the money shot of the mashed-up scorpion, disconcertingly resembling beef stroganoff. No, I do know which is the worst: the ragworms. Cole manages three of these, each a little under a foot long. They bite him back when he puts them in his mouth. As he delivers the coup de grace and begins to crunch, his gag reflex is so strong that a half-chewed ragworm corpse splatters out of his mouth. Undeterred, he slurps it back in like a ribbon of fettuccine. If it all sounds idiotic, pointless and embarrassingly laddish, the most surprising thing about Cole is that he doesn't talk or act like an extra from Jackass. He's softly-spoken and rather unassuming in person. Before he started earning what he tells me is "enough to survive on" making his YouTube videos, he spent five years as a community worker helping to run an organisation that sought to protect inner city children from gangs. He has taken troubled youths to countries such as Zambia, and says it was terrible when one London council ended its association with him after it became aware of his YouTube channel. Cole started eating strange things for dares a few years ago. "My mates would get me to eat a spider," he says. "I never had any problem with it." He began with the easy stuff – a wasp, a rotten apple – before graduating to more challenging delicacies. Unsurprisingly, Cole's antics have attracted a good deal of ire. The RSCPA calls him "gratuitously cruel", and in a typically purple response to his scorpion video, Peta compared his "cruelty" to that of Raoul Moat and the James Bulger killers. It described the "agonising pain he will have caused to that scorpion as he was masticated alive between Cole's molars" (one wonders how they knew the sex), and called for him (Cole, not the scorpion) to "undergo a thorough psychological evaluation followed by mandatory counselling". Both these organisations saw Cole as objectively cruel. But Cole denies that he is a cruel person. "I don't want to inflict any pain on these animals," he says, "which is why I try to kill them instantly. On all my videos, every animal dies within five seconds." Is there anything he wouldn't eat? "A live mammal. I've seen a video of someone eating a live mouse but I don't like the idea. I've got to draw the line somewhere." I ask him whether he thinks of himself as an ethical person. "Obviously we need to treat animals ethically," he says. "But a much bigger problem is addressing human problems around the world like extreme poverty or the conditions that people are living in." Cole argues that much of the revulsion people feel towards his videos is cultural. "I was chatting to a girl from the Philippines, where they eat a lot of strange food" he says. "None of my films grossed her out. I've been to lots of developing countries: in South Africa we were in a food market in one of the townships and they were selling cooked sheep's heads. People were cracking them open and eating the brains the way you or I would eat a kebab." Cole is "very interested" in the recent UN campaign promoting insects as a food source. "Most insects and arachnids taste actually all right," he says. "Cockroaches are another matter: they're absolutely vile." Even if these are potentially valuable lessons, I suspect that they're of secondary importance to Cole. He admits he started his channel "to see if I could get a million hits". In order to attract new viewers and keep old ones watching, he's forced to eat increasingly disgusting foods at the expense of any message he might hope to communicate. For his latest stunt Cole chewed up a live tarantula before a crowd of shrieking YouTubers: teaching his audience about other cultures didn't look like much of a priority. He concedes: "Some of my friends think I'm an attention whore, but I don't think that's it. At the moment, I'm not saying anything particularly productive with this channel, but it'll be interesting to see where this goes and whether I'm a voice that can be heard." For all that, I found Cole personable, considered and humane. His videos are a stark and shocking reminder that all of our food choices are based on culture and prejudice. And it seems objectively less cruel to kill a scorpion instantly than to rear chickens in battery cages or pigs in the most miserable pork farms. "I guess I enjoy riling people up a bit," says Cole, "and challenging them to the reality that to eat meat, they have to kill an animal. If they're genuinely vegetarian then they have more of a valid point, but one girl once did this long rant to me about how evil it all was, and then said I should just have gone to McDonald's."