Most tourists to Thailand are fascinated by the food cart selling with fried insects ie crickets, grubs, cockroaches, scorpions, and several unidentified members of the insect species, although most react with revulsion and Thais revel in daring westerners to cross that culinary line in hopes of seeing witness the European upchuck the crawly creatures as if they were rehearsing for a musical version of THE EXORCIST III.
Back in 1991 I caught a songthaew truck from Fang. It was headed for Doi Mai Salong, the old opium HQ of the exiled Chinese Armies. The road was dirt and the villages few. Halfway to our destination the driver stopped for an old lady and her granddaughter. She was a goddess bless with a naive innocence.
I heard a buzzing in her bag. She answered my inquisitive gaze by revealing a weaved basket filled with hundreds of live crickets. My smile flattened to a frown and her eyes revealed that the distance between us was unbridgeable. Her grandmother laughed at our awkwardness and scooped out a handful of cooked grubs onto a banana leaf.
I ate one tentatively, expecting it to transform me into Jeff Goldblum’s stand-in for THE FLY. Instead I was surprised by the salty nutty taste. Crunchy too.
My grandmother and goddess got off before Doi Mai Salong. She blew a kiss good-bye. I still savor the glance she threw over her shoulder, almost like I was supposed to follow her down the footpath to a hidden valley, where we’d eat insects and smoke opium for the rest of our lives.
She’d be about 35 now. Not old for a Thai woman.
Since then whenever Thais offer me grubs or crickets, I make a big show about how disgusting insects are, then eat them like pop corn, thus depriving the audience of their humor.
555 in your face, however if I tried a cockroach, I don’t think I could keep it down. This revulsion may arise from having lived in the East Village, where cockroaches were the bane of our tenement apartments. Scientists predicted they would survive an atomic bomb. My efforts to eliminate them were futile. Sprays, traps, and poisons had no effect. To demonstrate their invincibility they would crawl onto my bed to invade my nostrils.
Disgusting and I was never fast enough to kill the intruder.
In the summer cockroaches took over my apartment and I escaped their tyranny to the Hamptons. A welcome guest to a palatial seaside cottage until vagrant cockroaches piggybacked my bag and infested paradise.
Their victory over Man seemed secured in oven grease until Oct. 1997. No cockroaches had scurried across the bathtub in ages. I checked under the sink and in the refrigerator. Not a dead body in sight. At first I was happy, then remembered that cockroaches were supposed to outlive the human race.
If they were gone, why were we still here?
“Be grateful and don’t ask so many questions.” My friends hadn’t seen any cockroaches either. It was a Pied Piper of Hamblin type of miracle. St. Padraic leading them into the East River. And they never came back.
Not while I was a New Yorker, but the big water bugs make an appearance at my house on Moo X. Two inches long. Same size as the ones offering at the insect cart. Only those are dead and I had to ask myself, “How do these guys kill the insects?”
Have little SS gangs of insects murdering for them?
No.
Spray them with DDT. Maybe, but DDT leaves a funny taste in the mouth.
The mystery was solved during my last visit to Ban Nok.
During a rain storm my mother-in-law filled a bucket with water and illuminated a neon light. The bugs gather around the light and fell into the water. My wife’s mother scooped them out of the water to fry in boiling oil. No DDT or mini-gallows or electric chairs. A light, a tub of water, and a wok filled with oil. 30 seconds and done to the sound of lip smacking from the gathering.
Fresh bugs like in STARSHIP TROOPERS, only those bugs fought back.
For a related article click on this URL
http://www.mangozeen.com/eating-insects-in-thailand.htm”
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