Ah, the New York Times, long may it live! Read an article by Matthew Forney today on how his kids will eat pretty much anything. He kicks off the article by relating an illustrative episode concerning the pouring of fried scorpions into his son’s cereal bowl for breakfast.

I once returned home from a restaurant with a doggy bag full of deep-fried scorpions. The next morning, I poured them instead of imported raisin bran into my 11-year-old son’s cereal bowl. I wanted to freak him out. The scorpions were black and an inch long, with dagger tails.

“Scorpions!” shrieked my son, Roy. “Awesome!”

I had to stop him from chomping them all then and there, like popcorn. Then an idea struck him. “Dad, can I take them to school as a snack?”

I can only fantasize about being that cool at age 11. I don’t think I was super-picky, but neither was I the sort of kid who who’ve shrieked – with delight, anyway — at a bowl-full of scorpions for breakfast.

But I’m better these days. Still not a big fan of tomato guts, and cinnamon (of all things) I think is overused and overpowering, so it’s not my favorite. But I am definitely more adventurous. And I hope to become even more so.

The article makes the interesting connection between hunger and the open palate. In a way, it’s an obvious thing to say — if you’re starving, of course you can’t afford to be picky. But it runs deeper. The memory of hunger is enough to cure finickiness. In the case of the author’s wife, in fact, it was her father’s memory of hunger that cured her of picky eating. I wouldn’t necessarily recommend the method with your own kinds, however: the threat of death.

Her father had caught the fish that morning, and Paola sat at the table with the untouched skins on her plate from lunchtime until bedtime, when her father threatened to kill her. Paola totally understood. “He was hungry when he was young,” she said. “He prayed for trout skins.”

I don’t know, however, if the starvation –> willingness to eat bugs works universally. My mom grew up as poor as a farmer’s family can in Cuba. They had enough to eat, but they didn’t have lots of choice in what they eat. Still, my mom was willing to go hungry rather than eat anything that wasn’t up to her standards.

She’s much more open as an adult — aren’t we all, really? — but that reputation has really stuck with her. Once, when she went back for a visit in Cuba, the family cooked a pig-head stew for her. But, see, if they told her it was pig-head stew — it’s exactly what you think, a stew that features one pig head as its main ingredient — they worried Mom wouldn’t have any. So they didn’t tell her what she was eating; I think they told her “pork stew” or something.

So she takes a big spoonful of soup, sticks it in her mouth, and tries to chew on something that’s … hard. Piece of gristle? Bone? She spits whatever it is into her hand, where she sees that it is a tooth: a pig molar. Only, she didn’t know she was eating pig-head soup and so had no reason to think that she should be finding any teeth in her meal. And a pig’s molar is about the right size. She thought she had just spit one of her own teeth into her hands. Cue the screams.

Love that story. But even if my mom offers evidence to the contrary, certainly, if we’re speaking in terms of a population, less food = less finickiness. And it also gets me thinking about the privilege that comes with vegetarianism, veganism, etc. For vegetarianism to work, you have to have great control over your diet, lest you end up lacking essential proteins that vegetarians get from combining mushrooms, legumes, green vegetables, tofu, and so on to make up for the protein carnivores gain through meat. To have that level of control, you need to have great purchasing power. And if you have that kind of purchasing power, I wonder who is on the other end of that power exchange, and what they have to eat as a result.

And I think I know the answer to who is on the other end: the Third World.

That’s why I don’t buy arguments that eating meat is morally wrong. I know that some countries (e.g. India) have vegetarian traditions on which the poor can subsist, but a great many cultures don’t. Without the infrastructure, healthy eating might not be possible without meat. And you can’t tell me that it is immoral to eat food that will otherwise keep us healthy.

So, who wants more fried scorpions?