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A few more reactions that came in via e-mail after the tasters had a chance to think it over:

• "More like a hollow shell than a snack. Very weak bacon-cheddar flavor. I'd have to eat a handful to tell you what the flavor was."

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• "Bits of cricket easily get stuck in the teeth, providing little flavor-savers for later."

• "I just think it is like eating a sunflower seed's shell, but with legs."

• "Surprisingly underwhelming, and I've eaten crickets before—this was like eating subtly flavored sand."

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• "That was a lot of bracing myself for an experience that turned out to be like eating a tiny pinch of dirt."

• "They could really use more legs."

Special bonus level: A.V. Clubber David Wolinsky was challenged to try a "cricket suicide"—all three flavors at once. He did, without batting an eye, and concluded that it tasted like three times as much nothing:

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The general conclusion was that working our way up to eating crickets was much harder than actually eating them. Bug-eating isn't that bad, if you can stand them staring at you with their dead, empty eyes beforehand. And the inescapable feeling that reaching toward a heap of flavored bugs for a snack is like getting your munchies out of the pile of dead flies that build up on windowsills and in basement corners. And then there's sensation of a dry, bristly little leg caught on your tongue or in the back of your throat afterward. And all the little creepy segments on their exoskeletal plates. And their little visible dangly crispy mouth parts. And the eerie sensation that they might make one last legless attempt to hop or wriggle away as you pop them into your mouth. And—excuse us, The A.V. Club has to go barf.

Where to get them: Online retailers. We got ours from stupid.com, but Hotlix.com has a much wider section of bug-related foods, including "Larvets," worm lollipops, scorpion suckers, and many more things we aren't planning to try any time soon.