Huh: turns out, in some cultures, they like to eat this enormous bug that lives at the bottom of the ocean. Not only that, but it’s considered a delicacy. They buy that insect’s flesh at $20 per pound!
It’s actually pretty cruel once you know the half of it. According to tradition, the natives catch the giant deep sea cockroaches by setting cages underwater to trap it. Then they rubber band the poor creature’s claws together and boil it alive! Once it’s dead, they remove the red exoskeleton and dunk the white, rubbery meat in butter or lather it in mayonnaise and stuff it in a roll. Sounds pretty disgusting to us, but hey! We don’t judge.
At first, we didn’t believe this could possibly be true. So we bought a ticket to this exotic land to see if they really did this. Turns out, they do! They even let us participate in their strange little ceremony where they all don bibs and take turns passing around this metal contraption they use to crack open the bug’s shell, kind of like a nut cracker.
We didn’t want to be impolite, so we tasted some of the insect meat when they offered it to us. Yuck. We cannot recommend avoiding this highly enough. For a critter that feeds off mud specks at the bottom of the ocean, its flesh was suspiciously juicy. To make matters worse, it turns out that the people who engage in this practice consider the claws and the tail the most precious part of the animal. We think we’re gonna be sick.
At the end of the day, we guess we’re kind of glad we tried the oceanic cockroach. Not that we liked it, but it was adventurous of us to try something new. Other cultures have their traditional customs, and we have our own things we think of as normal. Thank God eating this revolting, arm-length, underwater centipede with claws isn’t something we do here, or else we’d probably have to move.