A Matter of Taste: Some Web Musings
What does a spider web taste like?
It is musty and shockingly acrid. Or it tastes different, depending on where the spider is from: Spinners from California have salty, sun-bleached webs. Florida webs are tangy.
Spider web soup is an aphrodisiac, if you can finish. The finest restaurants serve nitrogen-chilled webs and web gastrique on offal. Their spiders live a life of leisure, fed only a diet of sweet katydid juice and the luminescence of butterfly wings. And occasionally peonies.
What is it like to eat spider webs?
Will the web immediately cling to the first thing it touches – your tongue, the jut of your lip, the chisels of your teeth? Will you attempt to bite down, only to have the silken threads dissolve like cotton candy? Or, it might be like eating fine hair. It might be like using fine floss.
Or, will it gum up, resisting your saliva, nesting, sticky, into your cavities like toffee, balling and wadding as you smack and gnaw, trundling around your cheeks, resisting ingestion?
Some food for thought.
Bon appetit,
Michelle Latham
Book and Print Artist
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