The first insects I had eaten were in the evening market on Sunday, the first day I’d gotten into CM. The mixed bag was about 60 cents U.S. and contained six kinds of insect. They were all pretty good, but a few kinds were delicious.

I’d bought them at this table; there was only one such vendor at the market that late afternoon.

I’m aware that pictures like this are kind of a tacky standard subject for foreign tourists, and I felt a little strange shooting away like this, just as if I was some gawker. But I tried each kind of insect and then bought a second bag for later, and some of these were very tasty. For my money, the best of all were the BIG grasshoppers.

The conference,

took place on a Tuesday/Wednesday/Thursday. Presentations took up the first day, and that evening there was a banquet of sorts. The main courses were beef, pork, chicken, and fish; before these dishes were many insects. I tried all of them.

and grasshoppers were among the best. Unlike most of the other conference-attendees, I tried all of the insects on offer, though several of them weren’t fantastic:

Of these, the ones in the lower right quadrant — the bedraggled sphinx moth, the rhinoceros beetle, and the longhorn beetle cut off by the edge of the image — were pretty bad. The Giant Water Bug also was disappointing. But the large crickets (genus Brachytrupes) in the upper right area, and the house crickets on the left side of the plate, were quite good, as were the two varieties specified already. After finishing the great majority of this plate I will admit that I was ready for the vertebrate selections that evening.

One of the 39 cricket pits housed in an unwalled area the size of a four-car garage — a concrete circle a meter across and half as high. It’s a self-contained cricket utopia (except for the part about being harvested as food, but then the crickets themselves never know about that part). There’s plenty of hiding places, food [chicken feed], and water [two plastic water-bottles laid on their sides, with paper towels out of the holes punched to let the capillary action draw the moisture up for the insects to drink -- brilliant in its simplicity!] There’s even a handy laying-tray with the right kind of substrate: coconut husks and potting soil. The eggs can hatch in a new pit and thereby start off the next generation. Seven weeks later, harvest time.

The scorpion (Heterometrus spinifer, looks a lot like the emperor scorpion that’s a somewhat-popular pet choice among certain circles here in the U.S.) didn’t have a lot of real flavor, but the texture of the exoskeleton was unique, and a fairly pleasant eating experience. But it was hardly as much fun to eat as some already mentioned items.

The last day included some papers (including mine, which went pretty well) and group meetings.