Eating local can be an adventure…….

So after a lovely meal of Peking duck at a trendy Beijing restaurant, I headed with several friends to what tourists call “snack alley.” This narrow street is lined with small booths offering adventures in gastrointestinal delights… for some. Scorpions, cicadas, cocoons, centipedes, caterpillars, starfish and the like await the daring.

 I thought I would try anything. I love bugs. The fried scorpions we sampled first had a lovely seasoning and were really quite good. The cicada nymphs provided my first indication that maybe I wasn’t cut out for this. Oh, I choked it down… I wasn’t going to be considered a chicken, but it was a toughie.

 We met some fun young people from New York who offered a bite of starfish. Nope…I found my line in the sand. It smelled awful. And the young men confirmed that it tasted awful, too.

 There is a term for this practice of eating insects – entomophagy. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entomophagy. It was pretty cool. But I’ll steer away from the juicy things next time.