Three days ago I was in Mexico City when a friend of mine bought a bag of dried grasshoppers (chapulines) from a street vendor. “They’re a good drinking snack,” he told me. And they were. We were drinking liters of cheap Mexican beer on a patio in Plaza Couyucan. I looked at their spiny little legs, dead and dry and curled up towards their bodies.
I ate them anyway, and they were good– exactly the kind of experience I wanted in Mexico City. I came there to eat. I’ve always wanted to come here. I wanted to see the colors of the buildings stacked together. I wanted to smell pork cooking and corn boiling. I fell in love with the Mercados, the cheese and meat and juice vendors tightly packed together in warehouse buildings. The streets are intoxicating to me. There are taco stands on literally every corner, sometimes several, each of them with five or six salsas stacked on a table with fresh limes cilantro and onions. Cumbia and mariachi music is constantly spilling into the streets.
Everything is much less sanitary, and I mean that in a good way – it’s not wrapped in plastic and hidden behind a partition. The fruit is fresh and raw and hanging from strings on a food cart. The meat is cooked right in front of you. Someone pulls pork from the bone that’s been cooking in its own fat; a woman presses corn masa onto a griddle, and fills it with roasted nopal and beans and avocado. People stand together on street corners eating tacos with their hands. I stood on a dirty, unswept street and ate the best chorizo I’ve ever had – topped with sautéed onions and potatoes and an addictively creamy green salsa.
It's common to use every part of an animal – sweetbreads (the thymus gland), beef tongues and pig’s ears, chicken necks hanging in shop windows, pork face pozole. I watched a man make chicharones, slicing the fat with a sharp knife, pressing and frying it.
And then there's the grasshoppers. What do they taste like? Mild, nutty, a little sour like sumac. Their legs, when braised, are a little strongly and fibrous. When fried they're crunchy like peanuts. Like most meat, they sop up the flavor of whatever they're cooked in.