Heh. You didn’t watch nature shows much as a kid, did you? I will never forget the image of a big cat gnawing on the hindquarters of an antelope-like thing, tearing of strips of flesh, as it was still trying to run away with the front legs. Gruesome.
See post #6.
It’s not served alive, but I remember my mother’s Joy of Cooking from the 50s had a recipe for how to cook a turtle brought home by a son or husband. It involves a pan of water being heated very very slowly.
A really icky episode of CSI: NY had a gourmet feast that included live octupi wrapped around a wooden stick. According to the show, if the little critters’ tentacles are not positioned properly, they can kill you.
Yes, but perhaps not the first to think of it!
Bleh. I own a lively little red-eared slider. I love turtles and not to eat.
I read a fictional novel that included a supposedly non-fictional tradittional Chinese dish.
You take live baby rats, grip them between chopsticks and hold them in hot peanut oil for a minute, deep frying them. Then you dip them in sauce and eat them.
Yummy, supposedly, but no thanks.
Certainly, rats are eaten in China. This link Home - AC-Tafk explains, “For newcomers, Mr. Zhang has color brochures, featuring a photo of Rat Kabobs alongside a bottle of Napoleon X.O.” But I can’t find a cite for live fried rats. Since they’re not kosher, I wouldn’t be eating them anyway (or at least, that ould be my excuse to my Chinese hosts).
Sorry, didn’t follow that link.
What I had in mind was live lobster sashimi
I’ve had live lobster sashimi in Japan. Tasty
Shanghai has drunken shrimp, which are small fresh water shrimp that are dumped in with distilled alcohol approximating moonshine. the shrimp jump around until they die from the alcohol. Very good if the booze is good. You pull em out still wiggling, peel and eat. Trouble is they are tiny little boogers, so it’s more a snack or appetizer than any kind of real dish.
That may be the first time I’ve ever screamed out loud at something I’ve read on the Internet.
Excuse me, I’m going off to a corner to shudder and twitch now.
My dad told me of a dish he ate several times in Argentina, you grab a goat/lamb slice it’s airpipe and shove a hose in it with spices in a funnel at the other end.
The animal inhales the spices into it’s lungs and then is slaughtered and the lungs cooked.
Not eaten alive, per se, but the prep work required I think might qualify.
You sure that wasn’t a frog? 
Anthony Bourdain, bad-boy celebrity chef, has a video on his web site that shows a live cobra having its heart cut out and served to him, which he swallows while it is still beating.
Link to the page, which is work-safe. The page has a click to the 1.43M video, which is kind of a gross out and may be NSFW.
That’s what I was going to post. I’ve seen video of this, too. Not only do they try to hang onto the inside of your mouth, but they try to climb out onto your face while you’re chewing on them.
I love seafood, but not that much.
How about the ‘four and twenty’ blackbirds baked in a pie? Supposedly a joke in medieval times. You bake a 2 crust pie with nothing in it, and whole in the bottom crust. Just before serving, you put the live birds up through the hole, and put it back in the pie pan. When you cut open the top crust, all the birds fly out.
Gotta hand it to those zany dark-agers 
Olive