I have been travelling more frequently to Xuzhou to work with the Caterpillar factory and NPI teams there. Last week I travelled there with four of my colleagues from Suzhou. On the second evening in Xuzhou, the general manger of the Xuzhou plant hosted a dinner for us that included some "Extreme Chinese Food".
Pictured above are pictures that my friend and colleague Yao San took during dinner. The item in the picture on the left is the foot of a chicken that was in the soup - intentionally, I think. I did not eat the chicken foot. The next picture has me holding a fried cicada which I did eat. I ate two cicadas while two of my American travelling partners ate half a dozen each.
The cicada did not taste all that bad, but there was no mistaking the fact that I was eating an insect. It had a crunchy shell and a barbeque flavor. Most of all it just looked like a bug.
The cicada dish was prepared after a special request from our operations manager, Scott. He has eaten many extreme Chinese foods since he moved to China ten years ago and is married to a Chinese woman from Xuzhou.
Our Chinese colleagues ate many cicadas. Supposedly it is a popular dish here. The waitress brought a large dinner plate of bugs and the group ate most of the plateful. I have to admit, my prime motivation for eating cicadas was to write about it in this space !
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