Kids say some unusual things - but not as unusual as what they sometimes eat.
We're familiar with the usual experiments - dog food, dirt, grass, mud pies, wax, pennies, dough of any kind. Things like that may just toughen the young digestive system. But some kids go above and beyond the mundane.For instance, when I was 9 years old, I tried grasshopper legs. Raw.
My dad had mentioned that a tribe of California Indians had eaten grasshopper legs. I was fascinated with Indian history and thought I'd try some authentic Indian food.
So I tore the legs off the hapless insects and gave the wriggling bodies to my dog, Fang, who gobbled them with alacrity. But after my first slimy crunch, I decided I didn't have any Indian heritage.
Nonetheless, I'd have eaten fresh insect legs sooner than zucchini. My parents suffered from the popular suburban syndrome of growing zucchini to excess. After turning up our noses at another limp plateful of fried zukes, my sister, Susie, and I would go out to the garden and use overgrown zucchinis to "sword fight." The one whose zucchini broke first was the loser. Then we'd pick the seeds out of our hair.
On a dare from Susie I once swallowed a slug, whole and alive. It was a tan baby slug, not a huge yellow one, but it WAS a slug. This may have been a reaction to reading one of my childhood favorites, "How to Eat Fried Worms," by Thomas Rockwell.
On the same note, Khoren Ouzounian of Provo ate a worm while trying to get his brother to eat it. It was in vain: His brother never did follow his lead. His sister, however, ate ants, and a baby sister was found one day relishing a spider.
Kathy Ferguson disgusted her older sister Anne by eating flies. The insects would crawl in between panes of storm windows and die. "Then Kathy would open the window and remove the bounty . . . " says Anne. Visiting Newport Beach in California as a boy, Will May liked to find seaweed flung across the sand and crunch its little salty bulbs between his teeth. He also thought it was refreshing to put his face in the gutter and let the fresh water rush into his mouth after it had just rained.
Speaking of rain, Annette Plyer and her friends always licked the sidewalk after a healthy downpour. Why? Because it smelled good. And Annette's sister ate the knots out of her quilt. Perhaps it was akin to counting sheep.
Obviously I wasn't the only child who tasted the uncommon.
I had a more common favorite in the third grade, however: paste. Not glue, but that thick, minty-smelling off-white paste in the can with the plastic spreader in the lid.
I used to think I was the only one with this strange taste. My third-grade teacher didn't think it was normal. But the other day my co-workers claimed to have eaten paste, too - far more than those who had eaten insect legs.
When I was a little older - at the ripe age of 10 or so - I heard my mom scold my sister for putting something untoward in her mouth. "You shouldn't put your mouth on anything unless you're eating it or kissing it," I added importantly. I couldn't figure out why my parents thought my newly coined proverb was so funny.
Other kids preferred to emulate adults - or so they thought. Stewart Shelline, at about age 4, watched a coffee commercial in which the actor took a handful of ground coffee and sniffed it deeply. Stewart thought the actor was eating the coffee, so he took a handful of fertilizer (which resembled coffee) and swallowed it. His stomach was pumped at the hospital.
I liked to eat sugar - white, brown or, in a pinch, powdered. Mary Beth Jarvis' mother caught her one day with her spoon in the granulated sugar. "That's bad for your teeth!" she admonished. "But it's good for my tongue!" Mary Beth replied. We both still have our teeth.
Orem resident Kristine Hansen ate conventional foods in unusual ways when she was little - such as putting a fried egg on her cereal. Her less-inhibited sister, Shauna, tried poisonous tulip bulbs. And every family has a similar story.
But tastes and adventurous tendencies change over the years to fit the norms. Paste has lost its appeal, and so has straight sugar.
However, I think some gourmet adult foods come into vogue through some childish tendencies. Who else would think of eating snails, calf brains, pig's head, lamb's tongue, frog legs or fish eggs?
And last year while on vacation in Bangkok, Thailand, I saw a street vendor deep-frying grasshoppers. I shuddered and kept on walking.