Woman eats live pet store animals for a week

Day one, cricket pancakes. Day two, mealworm fries. Day three, mice pie. Grossed out yet? These three recipes were concocted, brought to fruition, and eventually eaten by Candra Kolodziej. According to her article on Vice, she decided to give up eating processed and shipped meat products to take on the new and exciting endeavor of eating only live animals found in pet stores.

Her cause is sensible, to a degree, as the amount of meat produced in the United States is unsustainable — with 90 billions pounds of meat every year ending up in restaurants and supermarkets and the average American eating 270 pounds of meat per year. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, factory farming is a huge emitter of methane emissions, and is responsible for 28% in total. Because of these reasons, Kolodziej found it to be plausible to find an alternative — and her pet store extravaganza began.

At first, she consulted her doctor, which makes sense because you may not know if eating mice and mealworms is necessarily sanitary or if these critters are known to carry any sort of illness. With her doctor’s blessing, so to speak, she made a trip to the pet store to stock up on mice, crickets, mealworms, and minnows. She was incredibly creative with her recipes, encompassing main meals, snacks, and desserts. For example, she created a “cricket pad thai,” complete with 1 cup of crickets over shrimp, beef, chicken, pork, or even tofu. Mealworms were used in banana nut muffins – added protein, I suppose. And how to cook those minnows? Batter and fry them.

Kolodziej gets into all the lovely details in her recipes, especially in her mice pie. “Learn quickly why beef and poultry are excessively processed and packaged (without their heads),” she writes, “By attempting to remove the innards from a distressingly soft, malleable creature that reminds you of how much you once loved Fievel. Once you’ve carefully removed the salvageable sections of mouse meat located mostly around the hindquarters…” Yum. She then discusses the taste of each recipe, and for mice pie, “The flavor of my mice was potent, almost gamey, and much more like an overripe rabbit than a pig.” “Overripe rabbit” does not sound as good as a burger, but hey, it was for a good cause.

At the end of her seven day journey, Kolodziej concluded that eating mice, bugs, and worms was not so bad — she had increased energy, lost weight, and did not experience any type of nausea or sickness. Her goal was to show that there are alternatives out there to eating meat — but certainly eating live pet store animals is not the best option for everyone. She could have simply purchased a veggie burger and called it a day, but her extremism shows that you can be creative with your alternatives. Chocolate-covered cricket, anybody?