Crickets: Delicious and Nutritious

6-3-08
These are insects. They are covered in hard candy, but they are still insects. These appeared at my office last week when the boss returned from the Candy and Sweets Show in Chicago (tough gig, I know). When Christian became the VIP this week at school and got to bring home Toad (from Frog and Toad are Friends) I thought these would be fun for one of his “sharing times”. You know, “Toad Candy”, all the kids could look and say “gross!” and that would be neat. Christian reminded me twice to bring them home today. There is a very large scorpion in the big orange one, worms in the two suckers, and crickets seasoned with sour cream and onion in the box.


But wait, there is one more, a purple lolly with a cricket in it.



When Christian saw these he had his heart set on actually eating them. Something about big hunks of sugar seemed to make the bugs seem…I don’t know…tasty. I explained that the bugs were real, that they used to be alive, that they are now dead, that bugs are disgusting, that yes they are safe to eat but they are still very gross and should taste nasty, that there is NO WAY IN HELL I would eat them. And yet, here we are.

First there was the licking.


Then came the biting.


There was crunching and more licking.


“Oh look, I just ate it’s antennas”

And now we have the headless cricket for your viewing pleasure.

Disclaimer: I am not a voyeuristic freak using my naïve son for personal entertainment. For the record, I tried very hard to convince him NOT to eat this. But it was not going to hurt him. It is “food grade” (I can’t believe I called a dead bug food grade), and I really thought he’d stop before actually getting to the bug. I told him over and over that whenever he was done trying it he could throw it out, I tried the power of suggestion to get him to stop. But a boy’s gonna do what a boy’s gonna do, and frankly I kind of admired his nerve. Now I need to explain to him that it’s one thing to pull a stunt like that because he’s curious, but quite another to start doing nasty stuff like this on a dare. I do NOT want to be the mother of that kid, we all remember that kid!