On The Eating of Vermin, etc.

This past weekend was Easter Weekend, and for the past three years that has meant that I go on up to Julian in the eastern part of San Diego county for the O.C. Friends' Easter Retreat. I could go on about the kindly company of my fellow Quakers or the merits of Camp Stevens, but I will limit myself to one of the highlights of this years' excursion; namely, the eating of worms and scorpions.

There was some free time allotted us on Saturday afternoon, which prompted many of us to go into Julian proper and poke around. The town is justifiably well-known for its apple pies; there must be at least four pie shops on the one mile of the main street, and these shops proved the primary draw. There's also a lot of kitschy crap stores (including a store named Cats, Cats, Cats that put off even Bonny the Cat Fanatic), and three candy stores.

One candy store, the Old Mine, is really just buckets of stale taffy and Tootsie rolls in the small basement of a drug store. Another, The Cider Mill, has got lots of original chocolates and taffies and popcorns and all kinds of tooth-rotting, calorie-intensive health pitfalls. The last candy shop, whose name I now forget, is tucked away in the second story of a building just off the main strip. This candy store is more of a novelty candy store. Its shelves are lined with retro throwback candies like ox tails and chicken bones and acid pops other things with even more dubious names.

I had spoken against going to a candy store. I did not want to go into The Cider Mill and come out again carrying several pounds of empty calories in my hands (that would ultimately translate to several pounds in other places), as I had in previous excursions to Julian. But as I poked around among the selection at this other candy store, I felt no real compulsion to buy pounds of taffy or chocolates. Rather, I was attracted to the repulsive qualities of much of this candy. This repulsion culminated in picking through one particular section of the store that housed the scorpions trapped in candy amber, the "cricket lick-it" lollipops, the chocolate-covered bugs, and the tequila lollipops con gusano.

I'd been to this candy store before, reveling in the gross-out factor of these candies and reveling in pointing them out to Bonny even as a boy might revel in holding a lizard in front of the face of a pretty girl on the playground. This year, though, I felt compelled to purchase the scorpion in amber candy. This probably had something to do with the fact that there were additional f/Friends along with us that day in the form of the Remy family, providing something of an audience for my idiotic antics. I also got some cactus fruit candy, because that was somewhat hardcore (though not quite so hardcore as the scorpion).

When we returned from town and were messing around in the hall of our lodge, the children were gathering around me, eager to see my nasty candy with the bugs in it. I showed them the scorpion. It was a real honest-to-goodness scorpion trapped in that candy; its stinger had been removed, but otherwise the three-inch long yellow scorpion was all there, claws and tail and legs and eyes and all.

John Remy produced one of the tequila lolipops with the worm; he said it was intended for me as a gift. I thanked him, and decided to eat the tequila lolipop first, for his benefit.

The lollipop was a large, rectancular thing, about an inch and a half from top to bottom, an inch across, and an inch thick. The candy was a pale and translucent green, the better to show off the chewy center. It took me some while to unwrap the damn thing, as the outer layer of plastic seemed to have been shrink-wrapped onto the lolly. As I was unwrapping it, I observed that the creature stuck inside the candy like some primitive beast frozen in a glacier was not much of a tequila worm at all (these being the larvae of agave moths), but a regular old mealworm, like unto those that are eaten by my roommate's pet gecko.

I finally managed to extricate the lollipop from the plastic wrap. I gave it an exploratory lick, much to the squealing delight of the children around me. It didn't taste like much of anything, really. It certainly didn't taste like good tequila--and believe me, gentle reader, I know a thing or two about good tequila. It tasted maybe like vaguely lime-flavored sugar water.

I looked at the lollipop, and all that crappy flavorless solidified sugar-water surrounding the "prize" at the center. This was going to be an ordeal.

Several more licks, and no visible progress towards the worm, and I was thinking of that old Tootsie Roll pop commercial. "Mr. Owl," asks the naked wandering boy with the prominent and protruding butt, "How many licks does it take to get to the mealworm center of a mealworm pop?" "Let's find out," Mr. Owl responds.

Lacking the patience to be sucking on this awful thing all day, I tried to chew it. In truth, I think I am like Mr. Turtle, in that I don't think I've ever gotten all the way through a lollipop without biting.

Biting proved to be even worse than sucking (Get your mind out of the gutter!). I managed to chip away some of the lollipop by grinding it with my molars, conscious always that if I were to bite directly into it with my incisors I might well break my teeth. Chewing on the lollipop was like chewing on glass; the bits were still sharp and hard in my mouth, and had this terrible habit of getting stuck all along the cracks between my teeth. Having a mouth full of candy glass was even worse than sucking on the stupid thing.

So I resolved to take more extreme measures. I got the lollipop out and went into the kitchenette at the back of the hall. I looked around in the drawers for something hard, finding a can openener. Placing the sticky lolly on a paper towel on the counter, I proceeded to smash away at the lollipop with the butt of the can opener. It took quite a beating before fragmenting into smaller pieces and emitting a fair amount of white crushed candy dust.

Now, with the candy cracked away, I could get at some smaller chunks that included at least portions of worm. Naked portions of worm peeked through; here a segmented section of body, there a bit of head. Chewing through the lukewarm ice was still an ordeal, but at least now I was rewarded also with bits of mealworm to leaven out the awfulness of the candy.

The mealworm had a gritty consistency, like...well...grits. The taste was rather pungent, especially after all that flavorlessness. Not surprisingly, the mealworm tasted a lot like uncooked cornmeal. Like cold, slightly greasy and slightly rancid corn grits.

I described all this to the interested onlookers. I asked them if I had eaten enough; three-year-old Sonya insisted that I eat the whole thing, and who am I to refuse an order from my superiors? So I ate as much of the worm as I could. In faith, the actual eating of the worm was less unpleasant than the eating of the candy portion. I buoyed up my spirits by singing "Nobody likes me / Everybody hates me / Guess I'll go eat worms," although the children assured me that not *everybody* hates me. Sonia said she guessed she liked me, but I still had to eat the worm anyway.

And all the while, I was thinking "I compromised on my vegetarianism for this? Not even for rosemary lamb chops or a bacon cheeseburger, but for this? O, Man, how weak thou art."

There were urgings that I follow up this performance with a scorpion encore, but I had endured enough candy torture for one day. I promised the children that I would eat the scorpion for them tomrorrow, when Bonny and I had charge of childcare.

The next day, after eating an excellent vegetarian breakfast (those folks at Camp Stevens really know how to get a lot of mileage out of vegetables and tofu), I chased it with the scorpion candy. The kids and I were out at the treehouse near the lodge while the adults were inside in discussion groups, and the children wanted to see me go one better than the night before. I obliged.

Again, the packaging was eXXXtremely difficult to remove. When I managed it, though, the first lick told me that this candy was just as bad as the stuff I'd had the night before, but now with a very indistinct flavor of orange instead of lime.

Feeling brave, Bonny licked another corner of the candy. Then Sonia licked the bottom. I said this was all very unsanitary, but I guess it wasn't like I was eating scorpions for my health, anyway.

My patience was very quickly shot with the grotesque candy glass, and I didn't wait long this time before smashing the candy open, now with a rock plucked up from the ground. The amber cracked into shards; the empty ones I tossed away, and the ones with inclusions of vermin I proceeded to eat.

The scorpion, not surprisingly, tasted a lot like mealworms, which I expect provided the lion's share of its diet. It too was gritty and greasy and somewhat rancid, and made my stomach convulse.

The kids got a big kick out of it. I'm glad someone did.

I chewed through the body and the tail and at the legs until there were only little black scraps of scorpion flesh remaning in the the scattered chunks of candy. I declared that I was done.

Suffice to say, gentle reader, that eating candied scorpions is about as awful as you might imagine. Be glad I have done this empirical research so that you don't have to.

I can't quite figure out how to upload the photos to this blog, so I'm just going to link you to the gallery that Bonny made on Facebook of my gustatory masochism:
http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?pid=1718588&id=617021888&ref=nf#/album.php?aid=73721&id=617021888&ref=mf

And here is the video:
http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?pid=1718588&id=617021888&ref=nf#/video/video.php?v=83433566888&subj=1405575226