The Strangest Things I’ve Ever Eaten

GI Joe did it! Don't look at me.

That was the answer the survival student gave the leader when our group caught up with them. I was on a BYU survival course in the summer of 1973. We were hiking in the mountains of southern Utah when GI Joe came upon a porcupine in a tree and decided to throw rocks at it until he knocked it out of the tree and killed it. I have no idea what GI Joe's real name was. We all called him that because he wore his army fatigues the whole time he was with us in the survival course. Apparently, he had spent some time in the army before he started attending Brigham Young University.

I didn't witness the incident when our group caught up with the group in which GI Joe was hiking. I only know that the leader was not very pleased that GI Joe had killed a porcupine when he saw the crime scene and the dead porcupine. They tried to teach us respect for the animals of the forest and that we should try to avoid doing harm to the ecosystem as we passed through. However, we were on survival and we were always hungry, so a free meal of meat wasn't totally out of the question. "Well, all right", said the leader. "We can't waste it, so we'll have to eat it." They proceeded to skin the critter and build a fire to cook it on. I wasn't involved in the process, but I thought I ought to take advantage of the opportunity to taste a porcupine. After all, how many people in the world can say they have eaten porcupine meat?

When the critter was well done, anyone who wanted some was encouraged to help themselves. I tried a little bit, but it wasn't terribly impressive. It could have benefitted from a little salt and perhaps a bit of rosemary and thyme, but we didn't exactly have access to a grocery store around the corner. At least it didn't make me gag and now I could spend the rest of my life bragging that I had been brave enough to eat a porcupine. It was all about the prestige and glory, not about staying alive in the wilderness.

The following segments describing my other culinary experiments are not in chronological order. I simply wrote about them as I remembered them, not trying to organize them in a properly ordered sequence.

A Sego Lily

These are little bulbs that the saints crossing the plains often ate
to stay alive. I found one when I was on survival. They have a little white flower that looks a lot like a morning glory flower. The bulb is down in the ground about five inches deep. I ate it raw because I had no means to cook it at the time. It was a bit like a turnip. We also ate wild onion greens, elder berries and roasted pine nuts.

Snails

My father was good friends with Ed Peats, the owner of the Red Lion Hotel on the Columbia River near the I5 bridge. Dad had done some kind of favor for Ed, so Ed gave him a free meal for himself and his family at the restaurant in the Hotel complex. Ed said we could have anything on the menu. When I saw that among the appetizers on the menu were snails, I thought they might be a memorable tasting experience. They were tough spongy balls that were heavily doused with garlic and other spices. They could have been little lumps of rubber tree sap for all I knew. They certainly didn't look like any snails I had ever seen.

Crawdads

When we lived in Oregon City in the old farmhouse, there was a little stream nearby that had a lot of wild crawdads living in it. I was about 10 or 11 years old and loved to explore and find new and novel ways to get muddy. We often spent hours catching the crawdads, but we always let them go again. It never occurred to me to eat them. They were a bit larger than a big scorpion and looked about as hideous. Many of them were infested with some kind of little white worms on the surface of their claws. I still remember being fascinated by the fuzzy little hairs that covered the surface of their claws. They wiggled and waved when touched, so I knew they were some kind of parasite that hitched a ride on the shell of the crawdads. My brain said this is not something you would put in your mouth. It just didn't look like something that could be tasty.

On one such occasion, I was with a boy that lived near our house. When I showed him the crawdad creek, he got all excited and said he wanted to catch some and bring them home to his mother to cook them. Seriously, I thought. I gotta see this. So I helped him catch a bunch of them in a bucket that we proudly brought back to his house. His mother was quite delighted when she saw them. She boiled some water in a big kettle and added stuff like lemon wedges and other spices. Then she added the bucket of crawdads, worms and all. When they were done cooking, the mother showed me how to crack the shell off of the tail section where the meat was. I couldn't really understand what all the fuss was about. I couldn't get the image of those worms out of my mind, but I at least tried a few because everyone else looked like they were really enjoying the feast.

Elk Heart

I went elk hunting with my father once when I was still a young teenager. We went up north somewhere and stayed with a friend of my father on the evening of the big hunt. I don't know if it was some kind of ancient hunter-gatherer ritual or something, but our host cooked an elk heart for dinner that night. This guy was a true hunter that always got his elk each year. The elk heart was in his freezer from a previous year's hunt, I suppose. I wondered what other kinds of weird animal parts he must have in that freezer. The meat was nothing to write home about. It was pretty chewy and tasted gamey to me, but it was edible.

I've also eaten roasted ants and deep-fried octopus. Other notables were wild pheasant my dad shot and swordfish from a restaurant in New York City. The only strange thing I ever ate that I actually enjoyed was wild catfish from the lake near the house in Vancouver. But, in general, the weird things I have tried were not tasty treats I would ever want to eat again. I'll stick with barbequed filet mignon and mocha almond fudge ice cream, thank you very much.