Hokitika Wild Foods Festival
March 8th, 2008 by Tiffany Miller
This year, the event planners of the Hokitika Wild Foods Festival decided to sell less tickets in an attempt to curb the crowds of drunken rowdy youth whose motto (as seen on many of their t-shirts) is “F**k the food, let’s get WILD!”
I would deem this attempt unsuccessful. The festival is absolute mayhem. I almost felt out of place in jeans and a jumper, as everyone else was decked out in funky costumes, body painting, and wacky accessories - or all three together. And they didn’t even follow a food or animal theme. It is more like Halloween on psychedelic drugs. Imagine a deranged Stephen King novel with a “You Kill ‘Em We Grill ‘Em” plot. It’s great.
And there are plenty of wild, weird and utterly disgusting foods. I started off light, with a live worm in a shot of Red Bull. Okay, not bad. Tasted like a shot of Red Bull. I then moved on to deep fried grasshoppers, which tasted, well, a bit like chicken with antennae. “Hey, this is nothin’,” I thought.
Before I knew it, I found myself knee deep in wood chips and sawdust digging for huhu grubs. I didn’t even know what they were until I split open a hunk of wood to find a huge white squirming maggot-like bug, which I was overwhelmingly encouraged to eat by the crowd around me. So I tossed it in and bit down hard, and the thing exploded in my mouth. It tasted… like a grub. People laughed and took pictures of me, undoubtedly due to the panicked and nauseous look on my face.
And that was the end of my wild foods quest. As I walked past the Mountain Oysters it started to rain, and I took that as a sign that I should head home (and through the drive-through). I am well aware that there is nothing that unshowered drunken third-day festivalgoers love more than a big mudslide.
I didn’t get (or particularly miss) the chance to eat “bunny balls” or “sheep dropping ice cream”. Maybe by next year I can muster the courage. For now, Im gonna Have It My Way.
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