Except — except — cockroaches and dung beetles don’t have big black eyes on stalks. The restaurant served me fried eyes.

As for the critters themselves, I’m going to say that of all the good food I have ever eaten in my life, there is *nothing* like a giant Crawfish boil among friends. When I tell people I usually eat ten pounds worth, they usually call bool-shit! Well, you order them by the pound at most places (assuming you aren’t preparing them at home), and ten pounds is a reasonable order size. You gotta remember they come with the shell on.

As for the other act you were describing, it’s called ’sucking the head’. I don’t subscribe to this act, but I can tell you why people do. First and foremost it’s because they are dirty, filthy people. Second, it’s to suck all the spice-saturated fat out of the end of the head. Now, I happen to like that fat, but you can get it without making Jesus hate you. When you pull off the tail, be gentle. If you pull it straight out, a lot of said fat comes out on the end of the tail. The only reason it stays in there is if you pull the tail out to the side. Now, most of you are probably puking in your keyboards right now, but I’ll just say this: you can’t have tasty Crawfish without the fat. Spiced right, there is no better food.

Also, if you don’t get corn and whole potatoes (soaked in the pots spice juice)with your order, then you’ve been robbed.

I have spoken, let it be heard.

It’s simple:
delicious
also good
we’ll accept it
the HELL?

Animals only become edible when people do a lot of work to make it look nothing like it does in life. If the sushi chef isn’t going to even bother, than I’m not going to meet him halfway.

And with the right knife and starting point, taking off the tail, shell, vein and legs can be done in one fell swoop. I swear!

I actually handled the de-shelling and the de-veining just fine — the hard part was the legs. They were a little mushy & squishy, they didn’t come off cleanly, and they smelled bad. And I felt like a Junior Future Psychopath while pulling them off. It felt like this sort of behavior was sure to lead to shooting birds with a wrist rocket, then doing unspeakable things to the neighbor’s dog, and finally to keeping a collection of human ears in my refrigerator.

But, the skewers turned out really yummy, so I might do it again.

Some friends of mine dined at Cinderella’s Castle at Tokyo Disneyland, which they loved, until they were served whole shrimp with the heads still on. They said it was a little surreal to be biting the heads off small creatures in the midst of oversaturated Disneyness.