Scorpion suckers aren’t the sort of thing you typically find in the candy aisle of your local grocery store.
They’re the sort of thing that you generally find at gift shops and tourist traps across the West with names like Clines Corners or Wall Drug, usually competing for your attention with objets d’art like commemorative spoons, snow globes, jackalope postcards, t-shirts, shot glasses, bolo ties, and the other assorted road-trip detritus destined to be stuffed into a closet and forgotten forever the instant you get back home.
They’re often seen sitting innocently in a cardboard display box near the cash register—cubes of translucent red, yellow, orange, or blue candy and flavoring on a stick—each one with a crunchy and dead surprise inside.
It’s like they’re daring you to eat them in a classic test of machismo and intestinal fortitude, some ancient rite of passage. It’s the sort of thing that I would have guessed (incorrectly, as it turned out) that most people probably ignore out of disinterest or disdain. Or maybe they would pass it around to their friends and family for a few quick gasps of laughter or shock before putting it back. A certain percentage may actually buy one, I thought, but only a relative few of those people are willing to take the sucker’s dare.
Are you tough, or are you “I eat f***ing scorpions!” tough?
I decided that I’d be the second kind of tough.
So I bought three insect suckers at the Five and Dime on the square in Santa Fe, New Mexico: two scorpion and one mealworm sucker at four dollars each. Seriously, why would anyone put scorpions in a lollipop?
It turns out it was all the idea of a guy named Larry Peterman, founder of Hotlix Candy.
Meet Larry Peterman
Peterman got into the confectionery business in the 1980s when he purchased a Pismo Beach, California, candy store known for its extremely hot cinnamon suckers and cinnamon toothpicks.
“I had bought a candy store and decided to expand the line a bit,’’ he told me in a phone interview. The next round of flavors included a tequila-flavored sucker to which he added a worm as a final touch.
“It sort of took off as well,” he said. After a popular 1990 Newsweek profile, Hotlix began to create more insect-filled treats. The current line of products now includes sour-cream-and-onion-flavored “Crick-ettes” and scorpion brittle, among other things.
Peterman says that Hotlix has a new item in the works: a gummy worm that’s naturally a lot more worm than gummy.
“They have a sweet-and-sour and dirt taste,” he said, with more than a little Willy Wonka in his voice.
He says that the most of scorpions and other critters destined for consumption come from Hotlix’s own rural California insect farm. The remainder come from edible-insect growers around the world.
Peterman—who’s now mostly retired but still sits on the company’s board of directors—says that his edible insects don’t contain any preservatives. He wasn’t about to give away any of his trade secrets, but the answer to how you get a scorpion ready to be eaten was surprisingly straightforward.
“We bake them,” Peterman said.
The only other pre-processing is that the scorpions’ sharp and poisonous stingers—located at the tips of their tails—are clipped off.
“[The FDA] told us that we didn’t have to,” Peterman said. “But we did just so people don’t get them stuck in the roofs of their mouths.”
There are some insects even Peterman won’t touch—he says light-colored insects tend to be more poisonous—but the main factors in determining an insect’s potential as a snack item are whether they can find a steady source and the amount of processing involved.
Peterman’s company sells “well into the seven figures” pieces of insect candy each year. “We can’t keep up with the demand,” he said. The marketplace has spoken, and it turns out that I was incredibly wrong about how many people are willing to suck on a scorpion or snack on mealworms.
The Grand Tasting
The first lick—at roughly 1:15 a.m.—was pretty much as expected. A big blast of sugar and almost-banana flavor that wasn’t necessarily unpleasant. I guess that was my fault, though. It didn’t occur to me to actually check the label to see what flavor it was until after I bought it and got it back home. I just sort of assumed that yellow meant lemon.
Three or four more licks later my tolerance for suckers—banana or otherwise—had pretty much reached its limit, and I was still at least an hour away from the scorpion.
If, in your travels, you ever run across someone who can tell you exactly what a scorpion (especially a raw, un-candied scorpion) tastes like, it’s a pretty good bet that they have some interesting and/or disturbing stories to tell.
I love a good disturbing story and wanted to know what a scorpion tasted like—but not nearly badly enough to slog through 200 or so more licks of a banana sucker. You really have to hand it to Hotlix, because this is a solid lump of legitimate hard candy and not some cheap and easily shattered mainstream sucker.
You say you want to eat insects? Then you gotta earn it!
I briefly considered trying to bite through the sucker, but instead I decided to hold it under the tap and let the hot water do the work for me.
After about five minutes or so under the running water, the scorpion finally emerged from its hard, sugary tomb. It had a distinctly pungent, nutty smell strong enough to overpower the artificial banana scent. The taste is slightly acrid, like eating a nut on the cusp of going bad, with a just hint of sesame oil. The texture is crunchy, with tiny shards of baked scorpion floating around the back of your mouth.
And, with all due respect to Hotlix and their millions of customers, it was awful. The overall flavor combination of sugar, artificial banana flavoring, and bad crunchy nuts is one of the foulest food experiences I’ve had. Each ingredient could have been acceptable—or at least survivable—on its own, but together…no. Just…no. A thousand times no.
I still have two suckers left—another scorpion and the worm—but at this point I kind of figure that the one sucker is plenty, so I think I’ll do the right thing and stuff them in the back of the closet with the snow globes and jackalope shot glasses.
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