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Ransom Riggs
Japan’s waspiest snack
by Ransom Riggs - September 14, 2007 - 7:19 AM

cookies.jpgIt’s enough to make you toss your cookies: Japan’s newest snack craze is the product of a rice cracker producer who decided to spice up their recipe a bit … by adding wasps. Harvested by elderly wasp hunters from a nearby village, the digger wasps are boiled in water, dried and sprinkled over the cracker mix, then stamped by hot iron cracker cutters. As you can see from the picture, they don’t skimp on the good stuff (like Raisin Bran, they give you two scoops), though no word yet on what taking a bite of this delicacy does to your tongue. A bag of 20 crackers costs about $3, but supplies are limited since the wasps are caught in the wild, and “only the best” are used.

This sounds suspiciously like a schoolyard game of “would you rather” — would you rather jump into a pool filled with razor blades or eat a box of wasp cookies? Keep your eyes peeled for razor-blade-pool-jumping, coming to a Japanese blog near you.

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Comments (7)

  1. ugh…

    posted by donner on 9-14-2007 at 9:26 am

  2. Not my taste, but people eat all kinds of things.
    The individual holding it needs to clean his fingernails.

    posted by Bassman on 9-14-2007 at 10:46 am

  3. Being totally phobic about wasps and other stinging creatures, I just can’t look at that picture! Uck!!

    posted by cmk on 9-14-2007 at 2:32 pm

  4. Ya know, I live and work in Japan and haven’t heard a thing about this. Are you sure it isn’t just a one-off thing someone did as a joke? How about linking a source?

    posted by GuitarMan on 9-14-2007 at 5:55 pm

  5. I saw this on Cellar’s Image of the Day (September 12)
    Their source was spluch.blogspot.com, and their source was Channel 4 News.
    The trail seemed to end there, but I didn’t really look.

    posted by Anne on 9-14-2007 at 8:50 pm

  6. Blech. Let it never be said that the Japanese aren’t creative with their food. Pocky and sushi aside, they come up with some WEIRD stuff.

    posted by heather on 9-14-2007 at 11:33 pm

  7. Ate it. And those…, I’m not even sure what type of insect it was but it looked like a centipede, bug lollipops. The insects are crunchy, and taste like dried grain. Sometimes spicy, depending on the insect. Notihng gross about it.

    posted by Sun on 9-22-2007 at 6:21 am

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