Today's dessert: Crickets on a stick

Nicole C. Wong, a Boston Globe reporter covering the business of travel, recently returned from her first trip to China. The fifth-generation California native spent 16 days meeting with locals and Americans living and working in Beijing, Tianjin, and Shanghai. Here's part of her Day 6:

By Nicole C. Wong

BEIJING – A cluster of Asian gals gathered a few feet away from me on the sidewalk, staring, squealing and laughing as I munched on what tasted like the extra-crispy sliver-ends of McDonald's french fries. I was actually chomping on a fried cricket (see my photo above).

I'm a bit embarrassed to say it tasted pretty good. (But come on, which fried food doesn't? Same goes for chocolate-dipped cricket, although this, disappointingly, wasn't.) The truth is, I wanted a second serving. So I ate a scorpion.

You can buy skewers of edible insects – as well as snakes, seahorses, starfish, and other things you never thought of ingesting – for a few bucks a pop at the outdoor Donghuamen Night Market. It's a culinary carnival with bright lights, red-and-white striped booths, and aggressive vendors who lean over the counter and loudly hawk comestible curiosities. (See and hear it here).

But at this carnival, the freak show may very well be the foreigners who are crazy enough to eat insects. It's not like a lot of locals eat the creepy crawlers. In fact, the ones I talked to seemed a bit disgusted by the idea.

In my informal survey of more than half a dozen Chinese nationals who moved to Beijing from Harbin, Huzhou and other parts of China, none of them have ever eaten bugs or seen other locals bite into them. So much for insects being local delicacies, which was the only reason I wanted to taste them in the first place. I mean, I'm so squeamish around insects – dead or alive – that there's no way I'd eat one for fame or fortune, a la the TV competition "Fear Factor." But I absolutely would pay a chef to cook one up for me if that's a way to authentically indulge in the local culture.

Selling water beetles, centipedes, cockroaches and other exotic eats at Beijing's Night Market could very well be one of the biggest jokes played on tourists. It's surely far more entertaining seeing Americans swallow things that they routinely smash with their shoes than watching them fall for the myth that your naked eye can see the Great Wall from outer space.

By the time I arrived at the noisy Night Market, I knew crickets and scorpions weren't popular local dishes. I ate them anyway – but only after my Seattle friend ingested two of each without falling ill or even gagging. Plus, he raved about them.

"This is good!" Guy Nelson said after sliding his first cricket off the skewer. "It's kind of salty and crunchy."

He ate another. Then two little scorpions. "Good. Kind of nutty. Salty, greasy, nutty," said Nelson, a 50-year-old radio news director. "It's a little better than the cricket."

I figured I might as well stomach the adventure while I'm young enough and healthy enough to do so.

You can closely inspect the clean, bright yellow trays brimming with insect skewers and pick the one you want. The vendor tosses the stick into a big steel pot for about five seconds, then pulls it out and sprinkles a lip-smacking seasoning on it (which is probably salt).

Still, the bugs were hard to swallow. That's because they looked alive, with their bent legs ready to leap. It wouldn't have been so bad if they were chopped up into unrecognizable chunks or coated in a chocolate blob. But where's the edginess in eating that?

I squinted as I shoved the plump cricket into my mouth and clenched my eyes shut as I chewed, missing the chance to see what a spectacle I had become. I couldn't see how may people were watching, but I did hear them laughing.

Still, that beats screaming. In high school, I screamed at the sight of a spider in my room. My dad would reassure me that the bug was more scared of me than I was of it. Now I know he's right.

Nicole Wong can be reached at nwong@globe.com. For another take on China's insect-eating market, check out Globe multimedia reporter Scott LaPierre's blog item from the Olympics last summer.