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Confessions of a roach eater
By Nicholas Dewart
dewart@mscd.edu

Brutal Planet
Six Flags Elitch Gardens
Admission: $5 plus General Admission, or free with the ingestion of a Madagascar cockroach

My jaws slammed down like anvils as a crunching sound escaped my mouth. Warm ooze meshed around my teeth and over my tongue. It was a sound that still echoes in my head.

“That was one of the loudest crunches I’ve heard,” Elitch Gardens’ assistant marketing manager Jason Merrihew said. “And I’ve heard hundreds of cockroaches get sacrificed. I was pretty impressed you held it down.”

No, this wasn’t my audition for Fear Factor. This was the Madagascar cockroach-eating contest to gain VIP passes to Elitch Gardens’ haunted house, Brutal Planet.

My little friend measured approximately 3-inches long and, according to Merrihew, was hissing prior to delivery to my eating station. Apparently, only the males hiss.

The bug was a truly disgusting appetizer. His guts, with their mucus-like texture, slid around my mouth. The exotic flavor satiating my palate was horribly offset by his durable shell, which seemed indestructible by mere human teeth. I choked back my urge to hurl as his legs and antenna tickled the roof of my mouth.

“Drink the water. Don’t throw up. You can do it,” my friend called.

I never had a cup of water that tasted that good.

The water muted the nauseating flavor of my cockroach friend. It was a lifesaver and enabled me to get the cockroach down without spewing into the tactfully placed bucket on the nearby table.
My reward for choking down the insect was four VIP passes to Brutal Planet.

For the weak of stomach, like me, eating a cockroach to cut in front of a haunted house’s line is not worth it.

But in this generation of Fear Factor and TV desensitization, I might be a minority. Many people wanted to be in my place.

Before eating the bug, I held the large creature up for the onlookers to see and asked, “Would you eat this?”

A few feeble voices in the crowd replied in the negative, but to my astonishment, many of the patrons shouted, “Yes!”

“We can’t stop people from eating these things,” Merrihew said. “We got a shipment of 130 this weekend and we’ll have to order more for next weekend.”

Brutal Planet is a well-lit haunted house that takes people through the twists and turns of a serial killer’s house of gore. Upon entering there is a bathtub, where the mangled remains of a dead cat lies.

Quirky motifs of bedrooms sport strange accessories like pin-up pictures of muscle men and a microwave with a light inside. These touches add a domestic, everyday quality to the haunted house. Brutal Planet uses that normalcy and that subtlety to get its scares.

Overall, the house didn’t scare enough to justify the tingling sensation of an antenna that lingered in my throat a full half hour after I swallowed the bug. The benefit of not waiting in line on this cold October night was appealing, but my biggest reward turned out to be satisfied curiosity.

Now I know: A Madagascar cockroach doesn’t taste like chicken.