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This is a guest post from one of our readers and travel write Noah Lederman who blogs at Somewhere Or Bust and writes for a variety of other travel publications. Please see his full bio below with all of his contact info.
It didn’t matter that I was stuffed from dinner. It was Sunday in Chiang Mai, Thailand, and the Sunday Night Market was a smorgasbord of irresistible food carts.
“Sorry,” I exclaimed, bumping past the shoppers browsing through touristy t-shirts. “Oops,” I said, tripping over blind musicians lined up on the asphalt as if they were a crew team without a boat.
I stopped moving when I found a woman selling sticky rice that had been intricately wrapped in banana leaves. She was selling them for one baht each.
“That’s like three cents,” I said to my wife, Marissa.
I walked around mesmerized by sticks of squid, nests of noodles, jellyfish sushi, and other tasty nuggets that were on offer for less than a dollar. One vendor balled up pink goo and flung it into a bubbling vat.
“Let’s go,” Marissa said, unimpressed with the woman’s adeptness at quickly producing pork balls. But my wife had taken a wrong turn and dragged me deeper into the maze of food. That’s when we stumbled upon the sort of food cart that I had never seen before.
Marissa saw my eyes light up. “No. You’re not really going to, are you?”
On the food stand in front of us sat a pyramid of red and white french fry baskets filled with fried crickets. The Thai-spiced insects were twenty baht per basket.
“How much for just one cricket?” I asked the woman. “I don’t think I want to commit to a whole carton.” (We had just begun our journey through the market and there was much food to be sampled on an already bloated stomach.)
“Free,” she told me with a wry smile.
I picked up one cricket from the colony and spun it between my pointer and thumb. It was brittle and its legs cracked off. Two little black eyes reflected the light hanging overhead. I popped the creature into my mouth like popcorn and chewed. In fact, the insect was the texture of nearly-popped kernels. However, it tasted more like seaweed.
“Good with beer,” the woman informed me.
I walked the rest of the market looking for things stranger than crickets, but I only found familiar Thai specialties. I sat down for a thirty-minute foot massage to devise a game plan: If I were a bug vendor where might I set up the hive? For two dollars, a lazy masseuse on the foot-rub assembly line chatted with her granddaughter and pawed at my feet.
“I don’t think you’re going to find anything stranger than crickets,” Marissa said after our massage finally ended.
There was a mix of disappointment and relief and Pad Thai swirling inside me. But Marissa was wrong.
Stationed a few stalls down sat a no-nonsense bug lady. She sat with her arms crossed and a bitter mien plastered to her face. On her stand were signs warning photographers that they had better give tips for snapping at her insects. Laid out in trays were ten varieties of crunchy invertebrates. There were crickets of course, but also on display were an assortment of jumbo-sized grasshoppers, pasta-like silk worms, beetles the size of M&M Peanuts, and sharp-winged whirligigs.
“How much to sample?”
“Twenty baht,” the woman announced. I nodded and her assistant shoveled up two or three carcasses from each pile and tied them up in a plastic bag.
“What about that one?” I pointed to a bug that resembled a cicada on steroids. It was labeled mackerel.
“This one. Ten baht.”
“Just the sample bag then,” I said, not ready to ingest the Goliath of the insect world.
I began with the familiar cricket. It tasted the same, but this time, having been conditioned by the first vendor, my mouth watered for a beer. I worked my way up the bug chain to the grasshopper, which tasted quite similar to its smaller cousin, except that the grasshopper retained more oils and seasoning. The silkworms varied on my palate. Those that had lost their innards were crunchy and tasted like a snack you’d buy at a health food store, while the ones still with worm meat inside were silkier and tasted like a worm that you’d find in the ground.
“Tear off wings,” the woman told me as I prepared to devour a whirligig whole. I peeled off the black wings and when I bit down on the creature, I felt an explosion of innards on my tongue. It was like taking that first bite into a piece of bubble gum with a liquid center, if gum were filled with a warm and savory juice. I chased it with a beetle, which offered up a similar burst of pungency.
“Mariss, you’ve got to try one,” I begged my wife. I knew there would be no hope in getting her to eat an insect. She was scared of eating crab, the delicious bugs of the sea, and my father once had to pay her a dollar just to sample a mushroom. “Here. This one is the easiest for the mind to digest.” I held out a silkworm sans vital organs. Its face also looked the least like a face. To my shock, she grabbed it, smelled it, and then swallowed the small body.
“It’s terrible,” she announced.
“I’m so proud of you. Do you want water?”
“I’m fine.”
“Here,” I said again, this time pulling out a cricket. “It’s better than the worm.”
She was not eating a cricket. Not with its buggy black eyes and multiple appendages.
But again she grabbed it, chewed, and made the face of a child sampling a new food that they will forever shun from their diet.
“Do you want to try a whirligig?”
“Let’s get out of here,” Marissa said, waving down a tuk tuk in order to escape the night market.
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