DEL.ICIO.USCicadas a delicacy in China
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Tuesday, August 19, 2008
BEIJING — Atlanta’s full of cicadas these days. So is Beijing.
The difference? You can find them on the menu here. The singing bugs that provide a buzzing backdrop to summer evenings are available pre-cooked, ready to grab and go, at the famous Wangfujing Night Market.
JENNIFER BRETT / jbrett@ajc.com
No time to cook? The bug-kebabs are pre-cooked, ready to grab and go at the Wangfujing Night Market.
JENNIFER BRETT / jbrett@ajc.com
West meets East in the Wangfujing district. The eatery on the left will sell you bugs on a stick. The one on the right: chicken in a bucket.
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The creepy eats are a highlight of the market, a colorful and bustling street scene right next to a modern mall that wouldn’t look out of place in Alpharetta. (Well, except for the griddle cooked fish giblets and fried ox tripe in the food court.)
You can buy every conceivable Chinese knickknack here, from decorative chopsticks to silk handbags to little Buddha statues. A vendor playing an instrument that resembled an eggplant-shaped wooden recorder added a soothing soundtrack against the din of shoppers the night we stopped by.
Although the Night Market is on every tourist map of Beijing, it seems to attract a largely local crowd. (The difference? The locals are the ones eating while the tourists take pictures.)
The food vendors do a brisk business selling grilled corn, glazed fruits, baked goods and meat and chicken on wooden skewers, grilled to order. Then there are the rows of cooked cicadas, beetles, grasshoppers and other items we might not think of eating in the United States. I bought a sea horse on a stick, which I thought looked sort of cute, and offered it to a vendor named Yi Ming Xie.
“It’s very good,” she said. “It’s salty. Crunchy.”
Then she looked at me like I was nuts for passing up perfectly good sea horse.
“You don’t eat it? Why?”
So, back to the cicadas. National Geographic says they’re low-fat and high in protein, and “considered a delicacy by many people around the world.”
Not by everyone, though. I decided to pass, although my friend Steve Politi, sports columnist for the Newark, N.J., Star-Ledger, was game.
“It tasted like … death,” he said, wincing.
Beijing’s full of sportswriters these days, and I’m not sure how many society columnists. The difference? Only one of us will eat bugs.
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