New York City man eats 13 cockroaches to win Apple iPod

“With a short scream mixed with a laugh, 15-year-old Bettie Abney of Nanuet rushed from the cooking demonstration to her friends, hands to her mouth, calling ‘I ate bugs! I ate bugs!’ ‘I wouldn’t,’ said Nasreen Jones, 17, of Nanuet. ‘It’s nasty.’ Author and chef David George Gordon is used to people panning his creations. The author of ‘The Eat-a-Bug Cookbook’ was at the Palisades Center yesterday to help promote the IMAX film ‘A Rainforest Adventure: Bugs! in 3D.'” Radni Weiner reports for The Journal News, a newspaper serving Westchester, Rockland and Putnam Counties in New York.

“He cooked, he lectured, he joked, and he oversaw a competition among the strong-stomached for an Apple iPod that was won by Manhattanite Shai Pariente, 22. Pariente was fastest among three finalists at eating a baker’s dozen of oven-baked cockroaches – and he did it with his hands tied behind his back and without ketchup. ‘They were good,’ he said, cradling the box with the small computer inside. ‘Crunchy and salty. I would eat them again,'” Weiner reports.

Full article here.

MacDailyNews Take: In related news, a contest in Alameda, California required people to eat two slices of pizza and drink as much free beer as they could to win a Dell DJ; there were no takers and the contest was cancelled. Organizers cited carbo-loading concerns among potential entrants combined with the lack of a compelling prize for the contest’s collapse. One onlooker told MacDailyNews, “I’d rather eat bugs than get stuck with a Dell Digital Junkbox.”

21 Comments

  1. “I wonder where they got the roaches. The GI tract of a cockroach can harbor anything from HIV to the flu. I hope they were WELL DONE.”

    Come on, where would a cockroach contract HIV?? Blood transfusion? Sexual intercourse with an infected human or primate?
    A digestive system pretty much takes care of viruses if they cannot get inside cells of the intestinal lining. And roach cells do not carry the receptors for HIV. That’s called host specificity of a pathogen.
    I don’t know about the flu, but riding the subway appears to be a much greater risk.

  2. I like MDN’s comment that you can’t even pay some people to use a Dell. The bottom line is that to own a Dell first requires polluting one’s brain with alcohol or other mind-altering substances.

    I suppose that “Delling” will be synonymous with suffering regrettable acts influenced by ethanol or other drugs.

  3. How about a roach that has been eating medical waste? Not all medical waste comes from homes, some comes from individual residences , medical offices & nursing homes. Not all of it is properly disposed of.
    Not for anything- ever. No matter how well done.

  4. You can get HIV from eating roaches????? Haven’t heard that one before.

    Liked MDNs satire. My nephew was gonna get a Dull DJ but I set him straight and he is really glad now.

  5. Big deal. I once ate a housecat, raw but with wasabi and soy, just to win a free pair of chopsticks. Cockroaches are for sissies. Especially if they’re sauteed, which is really quite good. The chopsticks were pretty nice though; they were mahogany with pearl inlay.

    Of course, unlike cockroaches, housecats don’t carry any diseases. Except for toxoplasmosis, but I think you only get that if you eat their feces, not the cat itself.

    Anyway I think I’ve made my point: This entire thread is disgusting and doesn’t really say anything positive about the iPod. You can buy an iPod for a couple hundred dollars. You don’t have to eat any insects. All that this article demonstrates is that some people would eat cockroaches for a few hundred dollars.

    Is that interesting? Not to me. Plus cockroaches are flaky and kind of bitter, whereas cat is stringy and salty.

    Must have been a slow news day here at MDN.

  6. I once ate a grasshopper in a Thai curry — misunderstood order it was. I guessed it by taste — the worst thing I have ever tasted — and it spent all of two seconds in my mouth. I wouldn’t eat a cockroach for a 2 x 2.5 GHz PowerMac with two 30-inch screens plus an iPod and a beemer.

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