A Feast

Hello sports fans! For all of you having fits over the loss of the Stanley Cup playoffs, there is relief on the way! This fascinating little tid-bit is from India. A man by the name of Ramesh Kumar is going to get into the Guinness Book of World Records by eating 50 cockroaches in one minute.

Where do you get tickets to that sort of thing? India, of course. Mr. Kumar goes on to explain:

"Mr Kumar, 26, said roaches and other insects had been part of his diet from childhood. 'One day I tried a cockroach and I liked it very much,' he said. The current roach-consumption record of 36 in a minute would be a snack, he forecast."

These days americans are becoming inured to such antics, as nearly all the so-called reality shows have people eating raw moose livers and maggots on a regular basis, and all for money. I guess that getting into the record books is a similar enterprise, but evidently eating bugs is the thing to do as a child in his village. Remember, this is the country where a single bus accident can kill over 300 people, so eating cockroaches probably does not raise a single eyebrow. What kind of cuisine makes the local cockroach a yummy desert? I can tell you that if I have eaten a cockroach and find out I am likely to sue the restaurant, or at least make a racket. It's not that it hasn't happened and I never found out, and it did not hurt me. I have not, willingly, placed a cockroach in my mouth for any reason, ever. I do not plan to.

What occurs to a human being, upon observing a cockroach skittering across the floor, to consume it? I understand prison camps and starvation, and, yes, I suppose I would eat about anything to survive. This guy had done this as a hobby since childhood. Now he is going to stuff them down his gullet like he is at a hot-dog eating contest. I have seen pictures of cockroaches from the far east. They look like baseball sized demons from bug-hell, and I cannot imagine what kind of date he is going to pick up after this adventure. Then again, he is apparently a cheap date.

I watched my brother eat a bug when we were just wee bairnes. It was a large beetle, and he seemed to enjoy crunching away, with a wing hanging on his lower lip. I just about threw up my toenails, and I dragged him up to the house hollering about the disaster that was occurring. My mother, being a nurse, just shrugged her shoulders and muttered something about 'extra protein.' Nurses are more pragmatic than most. That still did not change my mind about eating bugs, nor hers I believe. We had roaches in the house once and I do not remember her reaching out to eat one. In fact she did not touch them except with a RAID can. I guess she figured that for someone else it was a protein supplement, but SHE was not going to eat one.

Ahmen.