No joke: Sampling weird harvests

The Halloween decor is gone, packed in no less than four - yes, four - boxes in the garage. In its place is a single, more tasteful display of squashes and dried flowers to celebrate the Thanksgiving harvest.

Yet even hallowed harvests can get weird. No joke; some of the things people cultivate - and have done for millennia since agriculture's origins in the Middle and Far East - will leave you shaking your head or feeling as icky as these sound:

Onyanga, the giant desert onion. Namibia's plant Welwitschia Mirabilis is quite simple - two leaves and a rather ugly, protruding root, but very hardy. One plant lives for centuries and can endure five years without water, growing up to 25 feet wide and 6 feet high. Eat it raw or baked in hot ash.

Rafflesia arnoldii, the corpse flower. The rotting carrion smell it emits attracts both prey (bugs), and predators (rabbits). Grown for their elusive beauty (Indonesians think so; it's their national flower) with its 3-foot blooms opening only three days per year, they are the world's largest cultivated flowers and weigh up to 24 pounds. Indonesia has one other foul-smelling "corpse flower;" the tall titan arum may top 10 feet.

Duck flipper. OK, duck isn't weird, but how about their feet? No joke; I was served glazed duck-foot-webbing in a Beijing restaurant 10 years ago. Yes, it was chewy. And very eewey.

Tuna eyes. Same game; never mind the fish, the jelly-like eyes fried in garlic are a Japanese delicacy.

Tarantulas. Cambodians fry them whole, venom and all. The Piaroa Indians in Venezuela cook the furry spiders in their own eggs, or roast them in a leaf. Tastes shellfish-y.

Sannakji, wriggling octopus. In a Korean restaurant, instead of lobsters the tank holds little, living octopi whose tentacles are cut, dipped in sesame seeds and brought wriggling to the table. Tickles as it goes down. Same deal for poor little odori ebi (Japanese for "dancing shrimp") - a skillfully prepared sashimi. Diners like to see the bodies squirm as they approach the mouth. Head may be fried and served on the side.

A Danish, anyone? Skip the sugar and try ant salad, but you'll still need a lot of dough. Noma, a world-renown restaurant in Copenhagen, charges 300 for lettuce topped with a hill of butter whose struggling climbers are chilled, slow-moving black ants. But not just any ants these taste like citrus. Even at the Noma which opened last year in London, diners consume some of the 22,000 ants Chef Martin imported specially from Denmark. Crme fraiche is optional.

Want the irony? Ants predate humans in cultivating their own food. In the time of dinosaurs, ants collected and grew fungus in their nests to store for scores of dinners. So did beetles and termites. Yes, people eat them too. A low-fat protein alternative.

Want to grow your own edible bug crop? No joke; Austrian Katherina Unger designed a handy kitchen appliance for you, a table-top mini-farm.

Now who's hungry?

Sholeh Patrick is a columnist for the Hagadone Food Network who's thinking vegetarian sounds better and better. Contact her at sholeh@cdapress.com.