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+title: 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.