Although they eat some very unusual shit in Thailand, cooking with poo is, thankfully, not literal. It's the cooking school of Poo, a lady from the Khlong Toei slum in Bangkok. Before starting her cooking school, Poo spent 14 hours a day cooking food and making live-in-a-slum money, about 200 bhat ($7usd) a day. But a bubbly personality, a pinch of escape-life-in-the-slum tenaciousness, a dollop of getting-a-business-started help from an Australian missionary, some very clever branding, a well-titled cookbook (Cooking with Poo), and an endorsement from celebrity chef Jamie Oliver were the breadcrumbs leading her out of poverty. Despite the change in fortune, Poo didn’t move the cooking school into a shiny antiseptic space on Sukhumvit (i.e., the fancy part of town where poor people wear uniforms). Instead, she takes tourists to the ‘real’ market and
... read more