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From deep gorges to raging rivers and year-round snow-capped mountains, the remote landlocked province of Yunnan has some of the most varied landscapes in China.
It is home to more than 20,000 species of plants and animals, more than half of the country’s total, even though it covers only 4 percent of China’s land mass.
That may explain why nearly everyone I met in Yunnan, from merchants in Mohan on the Chinese border with Laos to taxi drivers in the capital Kunming, suggested that I try two things to sample the province’s specialties: insects and wild mushrooms.
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I took a bit of conviction: Restaurants offering wild mushrooms are popular on consumer review sites, and adventurous diners have plenty of options to choose from.
Dining options include Jun Xiang Yuan, located at the entrance to a night market in downtown Jinghong, in a corner of the province called Xishuangbanna Dai Autonomous Prefecture.
When I showed up one evening in late summer around 9, visitors were still queuing for a chance to get a table, a positive sign as the tourism industry struggled to recover after months of closure.
Their signature dish is chicken stew with eight types of fresh wild mushrooms, including bamboo mushroom, chestnut mushroom, and caterpillar mushroom. The head of the restaurant assured me that after 15 minutes of boiling in an iron pot, the soup had a “spectacularly fresh taste that you can’t get anywhere else.”
“You are lucky because it is harvest season, otherwise you could only have frozen wild mushrooms,” he said.
The opportunity for a fresh taste and profit from mushrooms sends legions of villagers and visitors to the Yunnan forests every year from May to the end of August.
The Ministry of Ecology and Environment estimates that more than 7,000 types of mushrooms grow in the province and many of them are edible.
Many mushroom hunters believe that mushroom growths contain high health and nutritional value, although Chinese health authorities have repeatedly warned of the risk of poisoning.
Last year, the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention said 22 people died from eating poisonous mushrooms, making it one of the leading causes of death from oral poisoning in the country.
This year’s harvest season is bittersweet – some of the best wild mushrooms are typically sold to restaurants in Europe, Japan, and South Korea, but that trade has changed due to the coronavirus pandemic, bringing the price down at home. . According to the province’s official news portal, the average price of matsutake mushrooms, “the king of all edible mushrooms,” has plummeted from 20,000 yuan (about 3,600 US dollars) per kilogram in May to 500 yuan in July.
But this could be good news for Chinese diners with money to spare: At the corner of the Shuimuhua Wild Mushroom Market in central Kunming, delivery companies offered to bring fresh wild mushrooms, from matsutake to fir chicken, to any door. from the country in a few minutes. days.
Unlike mushrooms, insects can be eaten most of the year.
For 99 yuan, diners at a restaurant in Kunming can have a sample of insects called “Bugs Story.”
The brief introduction to the menu said that the dish consisted of five types of edible insects: stick insects, bee pupae, cicadas, grasshoppers, and swallowing wood insects.
When the plate arrived, the insects were fried, the most common way of cooking insects in China, and served on a plate with a red carnation on top.
The flower didn’t stop me from hesitating, I really didn’t want to move my chopsticks even though I thought it would be impossible to taste the original texture of the insects after soaking them in hot oil. After 10 minutes of struggling, I made up my mind and put a bee pupa in my mouth, chewing quickly before swallowing.
It’s just protein, I told myself. Not bad, I thought, and stuffed a grasshopper into my mouth. That tasted a little stronger. And then a stick bug and finally a large wood bug.
“How was it?” asked a friend after I sent him a photo.
“Very crispy,” I said.
Now I know that when given the option of fried creepy critters, stick insects and bee pupae are the ones to look for.
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