A man is crouching by the side of the street washing creatures of some kind in a plastic bucket. I squat down beside him for a closer look at the squirming mass.
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Using large chopsticks, he gingerly picks one of them out to show me. They're scorpions, of various shapes and sizes, but all with those distinctive evil-looking, sting-bearing tails and pincers clawing at the air.
''Taste good!'' offers a woman beside me. ''Very nice.'' I look at her, and look at them. No, there's no way I'd fancy them wriggling, jiggling and tickling inside me. ''Make soup,'' she says, obviously feeling I need a little more encouragement. ''Very healthy.''
China's Guangzhou is very much the belly of the country, the capital of Cantonese cuisine, with representatives of all the other types of food on offer, too. Haizhu's scorpion soup, laced with mushrooms and herbs, simmered in coconut milk and allegedly brimming with beneficial medicinal properties, is just one of the unexpected delights.
But there's a whole world of flavours, textures and rather more palatable options available. Guangzhou, in the nation's south, is well known around the world as Foodie City 101, and as the birthplace of dim sum and, even better, it's all as cheap as chips.
The eating establishments are just as varied as the food. A man with a pan and powered mini-fridge on the back of his bicycle produces melt-in-the-mouth ''dragon hair'' - streams of what looks like fairy floss - tossed with crushed peanuts, salt and sugar. Another man with a barrow is selling artfully serrated pineapples, seared and doused in salt.
Street stalls offer a huge range of delicacies, from barbecued octopus on skewers to steamed beef rice-noodle rolls, from slippery fish-skin stew to steamed Tingzai porridge.
Then we move up to the thousands of tiny cafes dotted along every backstreet. One of my favourites for breakfast is the tiny corner cafe Yin Zi in Haizhu, which produces huge, paper-thin cheong fun, or rice-flour pancakes, from a big rattan pan steamer on the doorstep, filled with beef, pork, shrimp or egg, that cost just a dollar or two. t's little wonder the food all tastes so fresh.
The vegetable and fruit markets are ablaze with the colours of market garden produce from around the province, while the meat sections seem to have nearly every species of animal under the sun being skinned, deboned and sliced.
Some establishments are both restaurant and market. At the Hong Xing Seafood Restaurant, on the Pearl River in Lingnan, half the vast space is a cavernous restauran. The other half is taken up by containers of live seafood. It's selected, cooked and returned to the table, and is uniformly superb, although a huge, gloriously golden orb tenderly placed in the middle wrests everyone's attention. When the time comes to eat it, the waitress attacks it with scissors and cuts pieces for us.
''And what is this delicacy called?'' I ask Maggie Ho, our tour guide from Eating Adventures Guangzhou. ''Deep fried empty ball,'' she tells me.
Many of Guangzhou's restaurants are similarly oversized, with big round tables brightly lit by shiny chandeliers. ''Food is important to us and we like to see what we're eating,'' explains Ho. The food in each is exquisite.
At the Lotus Fragrant House we eat duck and broccoli from an earthenware dish, sweet and sour pork, fried lettuce and mushroom in oyster sauce, and pork and Chinese herb soup.
At the Sha Ho Fung Village, there are pork ribs steamed in garlic, fish balls, ginger and vegetable noodles, radish cake and - what a fantastic idea! - salted doughnuts.
The Restaurant Macau Street presents like a field of buttercups with clouds of yellow silk everywhere and has matching yellow prawn curry, tom yum soup, chilli potato noodles, tofu and seafood stew and what tastes like eggplant coated in sticky toffee.
The Kung Fu Fish Restaurant had lots of delicately flavoured fried fish, roasted goose and chestnut cakes, all to be mopped up with a kind of sweet scotch pancake.
And, of course, you can't visit Guangzhou without at least a few dim sums. Highlights for these include the Guangzhou Restaurant in TianHeBei, with its stunningly light prawn dumplings and sweet steamed buns with barbecued pork in the middle ... and my personal favourites, those nutty steamed buns with gooey black sesame in the middle, and egg custard tarts.
Is there any other city in the world so dedicated to good food and eating? Guangzhou is hard to beat.
