Are you hungry? How would you like to sit down with me for a nice plate of tasty treats: Crickets and grasshoppers and bugs, Oh my! Do I sense a little hesitation on your part? What . . . you don’t think those things sound good to eat?
If you’re shaking your head no, then I’m guessing you live in a place where people think it’s icky to eat bugs. You must be growing up in an area where people don’t eat bugs as food, so you’ve learned to think of bugs as something icky and creepy, certainly not something you’d want to stuff in your mouth for dinner. So you probably find it strange that anyone would want to eat a grasshopper or cricket. Yet kids in many other parts of the world grow up eating all kinds of buggy treats.
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In Mexico, kids love to snack on roasted grasshoppers. Kids in other areas eat grubs straight from the tree and think they taste like candy, or have a dinner topped with cooked caterpillars. If you were a kid growing up in one of these areas you wouldn’t find eating bugs strange at all. In fact, they think it’s strange that we wouldn’t want to gobble down a tasty treat of bug-grub. They think it’s yummy yummy in their tummy, and can’t believe we don’t think so too. To them, we’d be acting weird we refused such food.
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There’s an important lesson in this: sometimes we may encounter things that strike us as strange or weird or repulsive. Yet often times, the only reason we think this way is because we haven’t had the same experiences with it ourselves. It’s important to remember that just because something seems strange or different, that doesn’t make it bad it just meansit’s different from what we’re used to. So whenever we encounter strange or unfamiliar things in strange or unfamiliar laces, or whenever others do things we find odd, we shouldn’t turn up our noses or poke fun at their ways. Instead, we should tell ourselves: “My, what a unique and interesting way of life!” Let’s celebrate all the wonderfully different ways there are to act, and remember that we might do the same things if we grew up with their experiences.
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Eating bugs, and finding them delicious. It just goes to show: there are many wonderfully different ways to live, and many different things that can bring us happiness.
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