“throw the insect in my mouth!” I ate a Chinche - a live insect with its freaking legs on the its body!

I left my high heels and mascara behind as I headed into a Oaxacan village in Mexico for fieldwork with my friends/research colleague, Tanya Menendez.  (You can read about why I went here.) Little did I know that I would return as an insect eater!

Before I organize the thousands of photos that I took and pages of fieldnotes - I would like to share my second most important accomplishment after conducting awesome fieldwork  - I ATE A LIVE INSECT! here is a picture of a Chinche below. In my google search I found Chinches de cama (bed bugs - eek!) to Chinches de Monte - so I am pretty sure that I ate the Chinche de Monte, otherwise known as the Jumil from the insect family of Pentatomidae. Here is a article explaining how to eat Chinches, also known as stink bugs. I would freak out if they told me that I essentially ate bed bugs! (interestingly “chinchar” means “to tease” in spanish.)

I have insectaphobia  - I have never EVEN touched a real live lady bug before! I scream when any kind of insect flies near me - so this was TOTALLY out of my comfort zone. But I watched the kids eating Chinches as if it were candy, so I challenged myself.

In the first video above, I ate the insect without its legs - so it was really a dead bug. I asked the kids to pull of the legs off for me cuz I couldn’t bare to hear the crunching of its legs inside my mouth. As they were about to put it in my mouth I spotted one of the legs on the insect and they pulled it off.

In this video below, I you can see me freaking out as I am about to eat the insect LIVE LIVE LIVE LIVE! it was living and breathing when the kids put it in my mouth! I wasn’t brave enough like Tanya, who held the live insect in her hand and then put it in her mouth. The kids tried to put it in my hand but I had a really uncontrollable panic attack and started screaming. Little Esmeralda came over to comfort me. I swore the insect was going to enter into my body and implant thousands of Chinche eggs. I thought that I had lost the damn insect when I flipped out and threw if off of my hand, but little Orlando found it in the leaves. I had no choice but to eat it, but I still couldn’t touch the insect so I told the kids, “throw the insect in my mouth!”

The bigger ones are spicier and the tinier ones tastes more like cinnamon. The chinches that I ate were not too spicy. After you eat it you’re supposed to spit the body out because you’re only supposed to eat it for the the spicy liquid.

Here’s a video of one of the boys, Orlando, eating a chinche that he had just found on our hike.

In this video below you can see how the kids attract the chinches out of the leaves. They burn a tiny fire and slowly the really big ones come out! Then they grab different plants to see if the chinches are hiding inside.

In this video below one of the girls, Elie, eats a chinche live! And Tanya tries it out for the first time.