One of the things I wanted to do on this trip was try local specialities and food I’d never had before. Sometimes an areas speciality might be vegetarian or have a veggie alternative, but sometimes it is meat or fish dish, with no vegetarian alternative. And while as yet I haven’t gone as far as taking this quest for trying local food as far as eating things like dog, brains or offal this was the step across. Snails were the speciality in Yangshuo, and I’ve never eaten snails in my life.

We talked for sometime about how we felt about eating snails before ordering them. Some of the things we talked about was the difference between certain animals ie a dog would be harder to eat for most people than a pig and if that really made any sense.

We talked about when growing vegetables snails are one of the big pests. We’d both either thrown snails over fences, killed them with beer or by other means so was this really any different?

Somehow we decided that we would give them a go. So what did we learn? I think if anything eating the snails made my vegetarianism stronger. To be honest didn’t particularly enjoy them. The taste wasn’t that great and I did feel at least a bit bad for being responsible for the killing of about 20 living things. Even if they were pesky snails. I even might be nicer to snails now and carefully move them somewhere rather than attempt to accidentally on purpose kill them. I also feel better that probably most times we are not missing out by avoiding meat and fish.

It would be good to know what other people think. Has anyone else had a similar experiment with their vegetarianism or opinions on weather it is good or bad to do this kind of thing?