I REMEMBER THE FIRST time it occurred to me that dogs were edible, during one of those long, boredom-filled years between learning how to ride a bike and hitting puberty. My dad figured that I was ready for a life lesson, but since I was too young for the birds and the bees, he settled for gutting deer. He snapped his fingers to summon our beagle, Bo-Bo II, whom my dad had picked up from the side of the road because he reminded him of his own childhood dog, Bo-Bo I. He rolled the dog over. "You get the deer on its back," he said, "all four legs up in the air." Using a drink stirrer, he traced out the proper incision line up Bo-Bo's underside, ass to esophagus. The dog lolled his head back and forth in the ecstasy of human attention while my dad mimicked the act of clearing out its entrails.

My family and I had always owned and loved dogs—lots of random strays and one particularly good duck hunter named Duchess—but I could never shake the implication of my dad's lesson: Underneath all that playful fluffiness, dogs are made out of meat. From then on, I often wondered about the line separating the things that I was allowed to eat (cows, deer, chickens) from those that were taboo (dogs, cats, cockatiels). Who drew that line, anyway? And why was I bound to it?

Every culture has its taboo foods, particularly meats. For instance, most Hindus, believing that the cow is sacred, refrain from eating beef; many Jews observe the Old Testament prohibition against eating smooth-skinned fish and, along with some Muslims, refrain from eating pork. Rather than being guided by ancient religious texts, most Americans observe the flexible and arbitrary traditions of "gross" and "cruel," which lead us into a mind-boggling array of hypocrisies and insensitivities.

Take insects. Somewhere between 60 and 80 percent of the world's human population eats insects, and cultures in Asia, Africa, and Latin America sometimes rely on them as a primary protein source. However, there isn't one bug that is commonly eaten in America. Instead we make a mockery of insect-eating cultures through prime-time TV gigglefests such as Fear Factor, where money-grubbing contestants with wildly contorted faces gag on roaches.

Our disdain extends to many other varieties of food enjoyed around the world: turtles, frogs, snakes, lizards, monkey brains, horses, guinea pigs, house cats, rats, mice, and any kind of egg that didn't happen to come out of a chicken. And especially dogs. Before the 1988 Olympics in Seoul, South Korea, international animal-rights activists, including many Americans, applied so much pressure on the host country that the South Korean government instituted a ban on the sale of dog-meat soup, a traditional food there with cultural importance. Then, in 2002, when South Korea co-hosted the World Cup soccer tournament, U.S.-based animal-rights organizations signed petitions and protested because the government refused to apply adequate pressure to prevent the killing of dogs for food. Protestors got endless mileage out of claims that South Koreans consume a million dogs annually. That same year, the United States euthanized about five million dogs, at the rate of one every six seconds. Also that year, we maintained our lead as the top consumer and producer of agricultural meat products, beating out South Korea's per-capita rate of meat consumption by nearly three to one.

While many of the foods that Americans consider barbaric today are the mainstays of distant continents, dog eating has some ancient roots on North American soil that were exterminated by European colonization. Thousands of years ago, some Native American tribes viewed dogs as protective companions, as well as a readily available food supply. In the mid-19th century, the historian Francis Parkman traveled among the Oglala Sioux near the Black Hills of South Dakota and reported that dog flesh was a highly esteemed delicacy used to flatter privileged guests.

As America became "civilized," dog eating was associated with heathens. Now, you certainly won't find dog meat in your local grocery store, but it's not necessarily illegal to sell it in the U.S. State laws vary. In Michigan, it is legal to sell dog meat as long as it is properly labeled; in California, producing or possessing dog meat is a misdemeanor; and New York lists the butchery of dog meat as a civil offense. In much of the rest of the world, dog eating is still perfectly commonplace. The archaeological record suggests that the Chinese may have been eating dog since at least the Neolithic period, and there's compelling DNA evidence that they were likely the first to domesticate wild canines; all modern dog breeds have an ancestor in common with the East Asian wolf.

While I've eaten just about everything that you can legally hunt or purchase in a supermarket—from maggots to antelope bladders to a crown roast of kangaroo—I approached my dog-eating adventures with trepidation. I'd been scouring the Web for information by searching the words "dog meat" in tandem with every country whose inhabitants are known to eat dog, whether it's legal there or not: South Korea, North Korea, China, Indonesia, Cambodia, Thailand, Laos, the Philippines, Taiwan, Angola, Nigeria, Togo, Lagos, Cameroon. In my search, I ran across an animal-rights Web site and was surprised by a claim I read that the residents of Hanoi consume tens of thousands of dogs around the Tet holiday. I bought a ticket for Hanoi.