We hit the road last weekend for the central coast of California and spent Sunday morning in one of our favorite coast towns, Pismo. Pismo is home to some of the best clam chowder I've ever tasted, good surfing (so they say), pigeons pooping cryptosporidium, 1950s style beach dwellings, and the Hotlix candy store.
Hotlix was known locally for its original product, a spicy cinnamon sucker but then it got a little crazy and developed a tequila-flavored sucker with a worm inside. I knew they hit the big time when I found their tequila sucker at a truck stop in Kansas in 1992.
At Pismo I made the grand announcement to my son that we must get cinnamon suckers. I don't get out much apparently because somehow I had missed the booming insect business at Hotlix. Their display window looked like they had teamed up with David George Gordon, author of the Eat-A-Bug cookbook. We could buy worms, crickets, and apparently ants, all candied or chocolate coated.
Always looking for a high protein snack to get me through pregnancy and any excuse for chocolate, we quickly forgot the cinnamon suckers.
"Are your crickets roasted?"
"They are baked."
I am pretty open to raw food, but I do draw the line somewhere before crickets.
"How much?"
"Fifty cents for two."
"Wow, Mama, they are only twenty five cents!" Frederick interjected.
"Do you have any idea what kind of mark-up there is Frederick on that tiny chocolate cricket? People who actually eat insects don't buy them here."
I admitted I had consumed battered tarantula legs. The gals then reported that the crickets sell well and that they just taste like chocolate.
I recommended that they bundle those crickets up with Gordon's cookbook and sell them as holiday gift packages. Shockingly, my son who saw the uncoated crickets in the store window, has already eaten two of the four crickets we purchased and reports that they taste like chocolate. I doubt I'll get any myself.
But the big question is: Do they fit the bill for pregnancy snack food? At a quarter a piece, I would recommend salmon roe instead, which has the added benefit of being loaded with depression-fighting nutrients. Very few times will life allow us to justify the expense of wild caught, deep sea roe as a snack food bargain. This may be one of those times. 
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