Land of the Seven Moles

Even before I arrived, Abigail had prepared a schedule of restaurants and markets we absolutely had to visit. In my first market visits, I was reminded that the intense interest Oaxaqueños have in eating includes insects—particularly grasshoppers, known there as chapulines, and maguey worms. In Oaxacan markets, some venders who seem to have brought a bit of whatever’s in their garden will have a basket of chapulines as well, and some chapulín specialists will have as many as seven or eight large baskets, each piled high with a specific size of grasshopper. (Chapulines of any size are prepared roughly the same way—sautéed in oil that’s been seasoned with chilis and garlic and lime and salt.) I grew up in Kansas City, which, I think it’s fair to say, is not in a major insect-eating area. Where I come from, worms were something you definitely didn’t want to have anywhere near your digestive tract. Grasshoppers were thought of mainly as a threat to the wheat crop.

When it comes to eating, I’m not wildly adventurous. Sometimes I think that I’m too cautious. Looking back at those moments when I wasn’t setting the sort of example a parent should set, I can hear Abigail saying, while the two of us were perusing the menu at a restaurant in Cuzco, Peru, “I guess you’re going to wimp out on the guinea pig.” I haven’t felt inspired by those who talk about having downed a great variety of gruesome foodstuffs. Eating, say, iguana spleen strikes me as sort of like bungee jumping: the point is not to do it but to have done it. When I’m asked about my willingness to eat the ostensibly inedible, I usually tell the story of finding on the menu of a restaurant in Hong Kong an item listed as double-boiled deer penis. “I thought about ordering it,” I always say, “but I was afraid when they brought it to the table I’d take one look at it and say, ‘Maybe you could take it back and have him boil it one more time.’ ”

On the other hand, I usually like to try the local specialty. In Ecuador, I eventually did eat guinea pig. Given my experience with nutria in Louisiana some years before, in fact, I suppose that, if I hadn’t been raised to prize modesty, I could describe myself as a man with relatively broad experience in rodent consumption. As I studied the mounds of various sizes of grasshoppers in the markets, though, I found myself with a question similar to the one that goes through my mind when I see someone in Chinatown reach into a barrel of live frogs and pull one out for inspection: What, exactly, does one look for in a grasshopper? I thought I might ease into grasshopper-eating, following the general rule that anything is edible if it’s chopped up finely enough. That’s apparently the route my granddaughters had taken. Both of the girls had sampled grasshopper, although neither of them seemed keen on making a habit of it. Given Rebecca’s reputation as someone with an almost limitless appetite for corn tortillas—a woman across the road from the house Abigail and Brian had rented makes three hundred a day on a traditional earthenware griddle called a comal, and it’s clear that, left unchecked, Rebecca could put a considerable dent in a day’s inventory—Isabelle, who’s ten, had a simple explanation for how her little sister, who’s only seven, happened to consume grasshoppers, mixed with some other things: “Rebecca will eat anything that’s wrapped in a tortilla.”

by Calvin Trillin, New Yorker |  Read more:

Photograph by TrujilloPaumier