I’ve often heard that the worst thing about eating bugs is thinking about it. They’re actually very tasty—or at least, that’s what the people from Yoo Dong want you to believe.
Having acquired a can of “food-grade” silkworm pupae, I thought at first that it might well be worth a try. The idea in and of itself is very clever: silkworms are used to spin silk, but once they become pupa they are obsolete in their main purpose, so why not dispose of them by eating them? Unfortunately this implies that someone would actually knowingly eat bugs after witnessing a mass of them floating in putrid yellow liquid. The smell once the can is opened is pretty overwhelming, and a good sniff would probably make you sick. There’s also the fact that the silkworms come in a can, meaning that it doesn’t actually close once someone innocently decides to open it for a look. So you’re stuck with the smell of preserved dead bugs until either you throw them out—a waste of what is technically food—or eat them. It takes some guts to stick with the latter once exposed to the deadly combination of appearance and smell, but I didn’t get the silkworms to not eat them.
It’s amazing how every step of the process in eating a silkworm pupa provides even more incentive not to do the deed. Picking up a pupa, it’s covered with a urine-looking yellow brine that gives it a slimy coating and makes it feel like it’s alive. I pretty much just wanted to drop it at that point, and had to just thrust it into my mouth as quickly as I could.
The brine only slightly masks the taste of the bug with its copious amounts of soy sauce, also disproving the adage that soy sauce goes with everything. It might actually be even worse because of the way it squirts out of the bug when you take a bite, which may cause severe mental scarring and/or vomiting. After the salt goes down, you are left with a musky taste in your mouth that makes you feel somewhat like you’re eating rotten food. The silkworm itself, meanwhile, doesn’t have much flavor—but it’s the texture that really gets you. There’s an initial crunch from the shell, which also releases whatever juices have permeated the thing, and then a disgusting soft inside that feels exactly like how you’d expect the inside of a bug to feel. That sensation sticks inside of the mouth, and even if it doesn’t seem like the worst initially, will for certain make you lose your appetite later. It’s almost necessary to have a sweet drink on hand so you can wash out your mouth and prevent yourself from becoming a temporary vegan.
Having eaten one myself, I attempted to persuade some other people to do so as well. I mean, surely there’s someone who likes the taste if they’re a popular snack in Korea, right? Anticipating (correctly) that some might be reluctant to try a silkworm with the knowledge of what they were eating, I shrewdly covered up the label with a replacement that read “dried figs.”
Casey Wetherbee ’17: “I’m not eating it. It looks like a bug.”
Justin Tan ’19: “I guess … oh. No. No. No.”
Mr. Robert Tuori: “GET THAT AWAY FROM ME.”