Yikes, there are silkworms on my plate!

Many have heard the claim that Chinese people will eat anything. Even so, it is quite difficult to mentally prepare yourself for everything that you might encounter on your dinner plate when in China, no matter how well you've done your homework on the subject. I had to test my own boundaries when I found myself sitting in front of a plate containing a thick, roasted silkworm.

My first encounter with these critters was at a food market in Beitaiping Zhuang, at the end of the 90s. I stopped there often on my way home from the university to buy ingredients for dinner. One day, niched right there between the onions and the tomatoes, I noticed a basket full of strange, brownish, about five centimeters long cocoons. I was just about the ask the shop clerk what these new and exotic fruits were when I realized that those "fruits" were very much alive and kicking. In fact, the basket had become the temporary home of a colony of twitching silkworms, who were definitely not doing anything to whet my appetite.

Apparently, people still did buy them quite a lot, although I had a hard time imagining the type of people that would voluntarily want to see these squirmy little things on their dinner plates.

Well, I got my answer a few days later when I was invited to dinner by one of my friends. Wouldn't you know it, the host, who had prepared the evening's menu with me especially in mind, served us roasted silkworms. A rare delicacy, which cannot be readily bought from the store, not even in Beijing.

'You have to at least taste it,' my mothers words echoed in my head. And so, like a good girl, I gathered all my courage and picked up one of the ugly suckers with my chopsticks. As a desperate attempt to delay having to take the first bite, I tried to strike up a conversation about the tradition of eating bugs in China The host family admitted that eating insects and caterpillars is not a very common practice among the locals either, and that the people in the south are in this sense a lot more open. In that part of the country, you can even find restaurants specializing in 'insect cuisine.'

My hosts were of the generation that had lived through the war and experienced the famine of the 1960s, which explained their healthy attitude towards food which put nutritional value before appearance. And silkworms are definitely in a class of their own in terms of simple-to-eat, bite-size food packed with protein.

Having been raised on a diet of hardy Scandinavian meat dishes and having led quite a carefree life, I was of course not one to adopt such a pragmatic view of this thing with the bugs... Protein shmotein, a caterpillar is a caterpillar no matter how you slice is. Its interior is white, floury mush, and it definitely tastes like white, floury mush. I suddenly got the urge to become a vegetarian, but then I decided to put all prejudices aside and go for it. But that one bite was the extent of my experimentation in this particular culinary heritage. I was happy to leave the rest of the wiggly creatures to those with a more acute protein deficiency.