7 Crazy Street Foods In China

We love eating at street-side vendors and have our favourite ones here in Yangzhou. However, those foods consist of delicious cold noodle dishes, soups, wraps and fruits, not insects!

Here’s a list of some of the less appetizing street foods seen all around China:

1. Deep Fried Massive Spiders. These bad boys were spotted in Hangzhou and were so massive that I was even scared to take a photo of them!

Eeek! Massive, black, gross spiders at the street-side market in Hangzhou

2. Battered and Deep Fried Crab. Sure, crab is delicious but when it’s fried whole, eating the shell (and everything else) is a must and you’ll spend the rest of the day picking bits of it out of your teeth.

Deep fried, whole crabs for sale on the street…good luck eating the shell!

3. Duck Heads. How much meat could possibly be found on the beaks of these cute little birds?

I don’t see a lot of meat on these duck heads

4. Chicks. Are there not enough fully grown chickens in the world that people have to resort to eating the babies?

Can you see the chick here? Look for the tiny wings, small little neck and body!

5. Flying Lizards. Fried and stuck on a stick, these reptiles are apparently delicious.

6. Sea Horse. This teeny tiny animal of the ocean is sought after by scuba-divers.  Turns out, all they have to do is come to a Chinese street-side market!

Flying lizard anyone? How about the cute and seriously small seahorse?

7. Scorpions. These big, black, creepy crawlies have been spotted in both Beijing and Hangzhou, but we’ve yet to try them here. They’re just too big!

These scorpions are just too big for me to even consider trying!

We’ve tried small scorpions and maggots in Thailand when we were slightly intoxicated but we just don’t have the desire to try any of the “food” listed above! Who knows though, maybe it’s delicious and we’re the ones missing out…I guess we’ll never know.