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First post of random snack food

Eating in China without knowing the language has been challenging. I’ve been fortunate enough to frequently be in the presence of people who could order for me so far during this trip, but I haven’t forayed out much on my own. That doesn’t mean I haven’t eaten adventurously. I’ve had frog, snail, chicken wing tip, chicken head, chicken neck (I’m pretty sure I haven’t eaten chicken breast oddly enough), jellyfish, pigeon, and other crazy foods I’d never have expected to eat, and I’ve only been here a couple weeks so far.

At the local supermarket is an entire aisle of strange snacks. Things I’ve never seen and often have no idea what they are. I’m making it a mission to try these snacks. The weirder and more unrecognizable the better. I figure they’re packaged and on a supermarket shelf, so the likelihood they will make me sick is low, and I only have to pull it off the shelf, not order it, so there isn’t anything holding me back.

The aisle of awesome.

In the first food experiment, I tried something that appeared to be lots of tiny little fish.

There appears to be no English at all on this package. Awesome!

This things look like tiny petrified fish covered in spicy grease.

So, what were they like? Well, they tasted like spicy fish jerky. They were very greasy on the outside, but the fish themselves were kinda tough like jerky. You eat them head and all because it’s so tiny, but it wasn’t really like you could tell any of the texture of the head or bones; it was all just a single-textured jerky morsel. The spicy really kicked in a few seconds after eating, though, and took me by surprise.

I wasn’t able to finish the whole package; they are edible but not something I’d actively seek out again. I tried putting them on my lunch noodles to spice them up a notch, but it didn’t really make either of them taste better.

Final verdict: meh.

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