there's no getting past that smell.*



*highlight [font color=white] The pack I had smelled like the filter from a fish tank if you let it go too long. [/font] to read

the locals we were eating with were suitably impressed that i ordered from the "pre-history" menu.

but hey, if i'm going to a foreign country, why eat america food?

I took my last Spanish class through a university program that took place in Mexico, where one of the professors from the Spanish department and the students went to Mexico more or less together and took classes from him and then explored the culture. He had a list of 20 things that he wanted us to try (if possible - attending a wedding or quinceanera probably wouldn't happen even though we stayed with host families). One of them was eat grasshoppers in Oaxaca (where our classes took place). I was normally the first person to try something on the list so when we went to the local market, we found a little girl with a big bowl of chopped up, sauteed with chili powder grasshopper parts, and I tried them first. And then like a typical American tourist, I bought a shirt that said, "Yo comi chapulines en Oaxaca, Mexico," (I ate grasshoppers in Oaxaca, Mexico).

I joked later with the professor that because the shirt showed a stereotypical American cartoon grasshopper (Nikes and a fanny pack) that the whole grasshopper eating was only done by Americans, and it was a city-wide joke/betting situation, where they would send one of their daughters out with the bowl of grasshopper parts, peer out from their stalls in the market, and make bets on which gringos would actually try some.

I also believe this about escargot in France.

TlalocW

i definitely had "chapulines", though they looked more like crickets than grasshoppers.

i don't imagine there's much difference, taste-wise.


i think grasshoppers are more common in poorer parts of mexico; the locals i was with were upscale business partners and they said they'd never tried grasshopper and weren't about to.

however, escargot is very common in france and the french certainly eat plenty of it.

Our professor brought some into the classroom years ago in college, and they weren't bad. Just don't eat the legs, ugh!