Sick on a Stick – Eating Bugs in Beijing?

The following is an excerpt from an article published in the July 8, 2009, edition of the Oklahoma Gazette.

I jumped on the plane to Beijing, China, not only looking for a cultural adventure, but in search of a culinary one as well. You bet I was excited about walking atop the Great Wall and exploring the Forbidden City, but I was equally interested in chop sticks and chop suey, egg rolls and egg foo young.

My target for real Beijing cuisine was the famous Wangfujing Night Market and its infamous assortment of crazy street eats.

Not far from Tiananmen Square, the market is a hodgepodge of street vendors with skillets and stew pots cooking up a menu of sauteed serpents, roasted reptiles, grilled gills, fried fungi and crispy, crunchy creepy crawlies. The market is a must-see attraction for any visitor to Beijing and a perfect study of how tastes can differ halfway around the world.

This is the place for sick on a stick, and I was planning to man up and chow down.

I saw stalls offering silk worms, sea snake, sheep penis (seriously), sea horse, centipede and scorpions complete with claws and stingers. There were cups full to the brim with some mysterious smoking liquid, and huge, boiling pots of who-knows-what.

This ain’t Pei Wei folks.

There were even deep-fried starfish but no ranch dressing. Really now, who eats a fried starfish without dipping it ranch?

I walked the market down and back and found nothing remotely appetizing, and it wasn’t just the look of the food that freaked me out. If it’s true that half of taste is smell, then this stuff, I deduced, must taste like crap. The market was permeated by a severely unflattering stench, which, for me, was more off-putting than anything I saw stuck on a skewer or stewing in pots.

I quickly discovered that the palate may be willing, but the stomach is weak.