You Ate WHAT? Championship Edition

By now, I think it’s safe that we don’t have anything to prove when it comes to being adventurous eaters.  Every time we get the opportunity to put some kind of unfamiliar critter in our belly, we jump at the chance: we chow down on chicken hearts, blood sausage, sheep testicles, live octopus, whale brains, and silkworm larvae.  And (except for the larvae), they’re all pretty damn good.  In our experience, people typically don’t bother eating stuff that doesn’t taste at least pretty okay, and we’ve armed ourselves with that knowledge in our quest to eat our way across the world.

With varying results.

Now, China has a bit of a reputation as far as food goes.  Actually, from what we’ve heard, it has two entirely different reputations: in the popular imagination, China does not consume what we consider “Chinese food” in the West, but rather heaping bowlfuls of sheep eyeballs and cat brains, fried mantises and pickled anus.  And of course, depending on whom you’re talking to and how potentially racist they are, dog.  According to the people we’ve met who have actually been to China, however, Chinese people are bigger fans of less intimidating cuisine like fried noodles and dumplings.  This was a dispute that we had to settle for ourselves.

On the recommendation of Wikitravel, we made our way to Beijing’s Donghuamen Night Market, a site we were told featured traditional Chinese street food, and also snakes and scorpions.  Truly a challenge that we couldn’t pass up.

We took in the sights and the smells, which were spicy enough to cut through the ever-present layer of smog.  There seemed to be a thousand dishes for sale, most of them on sticks, all of them distressingly familiar.  Grilled squid tentacles, meat dumplings, noodles with cabbage, roast chicken.  Vendors shouted in Chinese and in English, and we tuned them out as we had done with touts all day.  One voice, however, cut through:

“Hello!  Hello!  Snake!”

We did a double-take.  The vendor brandished a skewer of diamond-painted skin and smiled.  We ordered two, with chili.

Honestly, snake is the least intimidating weird food we’ve tried.  The taste and shape were so similar to a garden-variety squid tentacle (that’s what we keep in our garden, anyway) that we half-thought we’d been ripped off.  Still, if you can’t trust a complete stranger selling snake on a stick, who can you trust?  Snake is chewy, savory, and all in all more food-like than half the stuff they sell at KFC.  The scariest thing about this experience was the price tag: 60 yuan for two, amounting to about $10, a hefty sum that would buy four much more filling meals elsewhere.

Worried that we wouldn’t be able to fill our bellies for less than a hundred bucks, we wolfed down some safer offerings, which tended to be much cheaper than the exotic stuff: grilled corn, fried dumplings, and a big bowl of stewed tripe.  Our hunger thus sated, it was time to get serious.

The friendly-looking young vendor called to us as we walked past.  He gestured to his many-legged wares.  “Hello!” he said.  “Hello!”

“How much?” I asked, suspicious.  He told me that each stick of fried locusts was 30 yuan, and I waved him off, assuming we could get a better deal at a different stall.  “But!” he yelled, then abandoned his English, made antennae with his fingers, and began making cricket noises.  We thanked him and moved on.

Sadly, there seemed to be some kind of agreement or syndicate at work at Donghuamen Night Market, as all the prices were the same down the line of food stalls.  We returned to Bug Man, deciding that if 10 bucks was too much to eat bugs, then dammit, we were just going to have to spend too much.  We gave the man a fistful of cash and ordered one stick of crickets and one of miniature scorpions.

This is when it first hit me that we were doing something crazy.  Somehow it had never entered into my head that there’s a reason most people don’t eat scorpions on a daily basis.  They're pretty poisonous, right?  Or venomous?  Is there a difference?  The Fear started to kick in.  Were we about to spend the next week laid up with food poisoning?

Well, if we were, we resolved with a sigh, then at least we’d be the coolest kids in Intensive Care.  We took the plunge.

Cricket is, I’m sorry to say, not a taste sensation.  My worries disappeared with the first bite, which reminded me more than anything of the tiny shrimp that are such a popular snack in Japanese izakayas.  The main taste was of frying medium, unfortunately.  Though the feeling of having legs stick out your mouth as you chew is delightfully bizarre.

Round two: Jenn and Harry vs. scorpions!

Note: we made a delightfully witty video of Jenn eating scorpions and declaring them delicious.  Unfortunately, we can't post it due to technical something-something.  Anyway, little bitty fried scorpions became our new favorite food.

Scorpions were clearly where it was at.  Not wanting to pass up an opportunity to explore this new world of deliciousness, we headed back to Bug Man to try a more intimidating specimen.  This one was a whopping 60 yuan for a single nighmare-creature-on-a-stick, but we were in too deep to back out now.  Also it's possible that the venom was affecting our brains.  We scoffed at the startled-looking foreigners who were tentatively nibbling on chicken wings; we were obviously so, so much cooler than punks like them.  Who would bother to travel thousands of miles just to eat something they could get at home?  We chuckled, then dug into our bug.

And the reviews are in!

Yeah, we clearly flew too close to the sun on this one.  There was some sort of meat inside them claws, but they were protected by a thick layer of inedible chitin.  It tasted like a mouthful of fingernails, something I've finally learned not to eat.  It...wasn't food, really.  Gnawing on a mouthful of shards of black armor did nothing but cut up the insides of our mouths.  Discreetly, we tossed the thorax and tail in the trash, flushed with anger over wasting $10 on something that wasn't even food.  The little scorpions on sticks were a harmless delicacy, something that anyone could giggle over and praise themselves for being adventurous.  This big one?  This was sold only for ego purposes.

As we conducted our walk of shame back to the subway, our reputation had apparently already made it down the line of vendors.  "Hey," one vendor whispered to the next, probably, "here come a couple of foreigners who think they have something to prove.  Bring out the weird stuff!"  "Let's see if they'll eat raw starfish or something!"  "I bet I can get them to eat a hammer!"

"Hello!  Spiders!" called one man, holding up enormous tarantulas on sticks.  "Dog!  Dog!" shouted another, brandishing some unidentifiable cut of meat.  We had been branded as rubes.

"What did we do wrong?" we asked ourselves on the subway ride back to the hotel.  We had wanted nothing more than to eat what few dared to put in their mouths...and therein is the lesson.  There's two kinds of weird food in the world: stuff that people in other cultures really do eat, and that's scary purely for cultural reasons (balut, beonddegi, most state fair offerings); and then there's stuff that was never meant to be eaten, but enterprising cooks know that they can pass off as delicacies to gullible tourists or anyone who wants to show off their fearlessness.  The big scorpion belongs in the latter category along with those hot sauces that make you cry and throw up.  We had proven ourselves adventurous, even fearless.  What comes next for us is to pursue the wisdom that most people learn at a much younger age: don't put stuff in your mouth that isn't food.