The Weirdest Thing I've Ever Eaten...And Probably Will Ever Eat

After I came home from China the first time, I got a lot of questions from those curious about my Asia adventure about the strangest thing I’ve ever eaten. They cringed as I told them of eating chicken stomach and lamb heart, but I knew my culinary experiences was nothing compared to what I could have been faced with eating. And then I moved to Nanjing. In the past two months I’ve been here I’ve had an assortment of oddly prepared things like eel (different from the kind you get on sushi), duck (bone and all), pig cartilage, whole shrimps and octopus (no, not like calamari). But strange food has now been taken to a whole new level. I’ve eaten a stir-fried cicada.

In case you are unfamiliar with what a cicada is, google image it. Cicadas are basically like crickets on steroids that kind of resemble a cockroaches. It was on my adventure to Changzhou with my neighbors that this catastrophic event took place. My Chinese family had joked before about making me try one before, but now they were serious. That morning when I went over to Ellen’s I saw two bags of, yes, you are reading this right, stir-fried cicadas. I think Ellen saw my look of horror when I saw the bags they were packing up and asked if I wanted to try it now. I told her “I have a rule that I don’t eat bugs before noon.” I don’t think she got the joke. “But you must later,” she told me. Oh no.

On a side note, the longer I’m here, the more I wonder why Chinese people eat some of the stuff they do. I’ll preface this with saying that I think most Chinese food is really good. Your average restaurant has great dishes that make American food seem bland and processed. However, I don’t think Chinese people have grasped the concept of tasty snack food. Even just walking around the dinosaur amusement park looking at all the different snack stands I couldn’t help but turn up my nose at the meat sticks, stinky tofu and other “treats” Chinese people like to indulge in. Where was the cotton candy, the funnel cakes, the snow cones and the turkey legs? Octopus on a stick? No thank you. Although, I did eat the chicken meat stick Ellen’s dad bought me, even though I said I wasn’t hungry. And then there is the dried fruit with salt that my coworkers love to snack on. To me, it just tastes bad. What happened to peanut butter crackers, pretzels or just a regular piece of fruit? Chinese people just eat weird things sometimes. Like the cicada.

And back to my battle with the bug, Ellen finally caught me in a moment when I couldn’t refuse trying one. After all, it was well after noon. She doesn’t like them either, and I told her I’d only eat one if she did too. “You’re so bad,” she said. No, you are for making me eat this. So I watched she bit the back half of it, chewed and swallowed. I followed her lead. I closed my eyes as I bit the back half of this brown bug. It had a little crunch to it and taste was actually bearable, not good, but bearable. Half the battle was done. But now came time for the head and limbs. After about 30 seconds of evaluating how to get this down without visibly gagging and offending the family, I popped it in, chewed with a half grimace and then tried to swallow. No luck. A gag reflex I haven’t experienced since I was a child being forced to eat peas took over my entire body. I hadn’t even swallowed and my whole body was already rejecting this so-called food. I thought I was literally going to be sick. I took a cracker and thankfully that helped me swallow the rest of my buggy friend, but my stomach still turns every time I think about it. And I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone else.

So, not only did I spend my holiday paying homage to communism and indulging in my neighbors’ excitement to take me to an amusement park, but I also have filled my quota, I’m going to say for the year, of trying new things. Will I have another meat stick in my life? Probably. Will I eat the dried salty fruit my coworkers bring me? Yes but will try to hide the grimace. Will I eat another cicada? That’s a resounding no. And next time you bite into your wheat thins, crave a funnel cake or enjoy real dried fruit, think of instead being subjected to eat something far worse... Like a cicada.