Having travelled widely, there are many exotic foods I could describe. In China alone, I have had the pleasure of eating barbecued scorpions, rabbit head hot pot, stewed dog, horse’s stomach, some unidentifiable green splat and the parts of a male sheep not shared by the female of the species. Yum!

But in this post, I will describe the experience of eating pulsating worms as shown in the photo below.

In a seafood restaurant in Qingdao way back in 2007, I was lucky enough to join a dinner party where we ordered these pulsating worms. A curious lump continuously slid forwards and backwards along their bodies as they wriggled and squirmed in their bucket of salty seawater.

We did not eat the worms raw. There was no slithering sliminess sliding down our throats. Instead, they were stir-fried with chilli and garlic. We were all obviously very excited to taste the worms and our chopsticks were poised like a group of praying mantises. When the dish arrived on the table, we got stuck in straight away. I had no problem with the flavour – it was spicy enough to satisfy my tongue that was accustomed to hot curries and Sichuan peppers. However, the worm meat was somewhat disappointing. It had been cut into small fragments, each of which were just a snippet of tasteless rubber that in no way absorbed any of the flavour surrounding it. It was as if someone had cut up and bleached the inner-tube of a bicycle tyre.

Yum!

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