By Karen Gutierrez
The Cincinnati Enquirer

Forget the breading, the sugar, the curry, the mayo. Real kids eat their cicadas raw.

That's what some are doing in Northern Kentucky, anyway. Call it a case of Too Much Information: News coverage of cicadas has been so abundant that most kids know they are edible.

"We ripped the wings off and the legs. The heads really do fall off when you rip off the legs. Then we popped them in and chewed them up," says Mike Shrock, 15, who lives in south Covington.

This happened on a recent Saturday at a relative's birthday party. Mike and his 9-year-old brother, Ben Cook, plus two friends, decided on the spur of the moment to catch cicadas and eat them.

Ben swallowed his without chewing.

"My friend did it and was kind of freaking out and making faces," Mike says. Mike, however, remained calm.

"It was kind of soft," he says. "The little nubs were still twitching when I put it in."

His mother was not surprised.

"I knew it was only a matter of time," Carol Cook says. "It's a male thing."

How then to explain Lauren Webster?

The 15-year-old from Hebron recently started to eat a raw cicada, then stopped when it stuck in her braces. She had to know what one tasted like.

"I heard about that guy who froze them to go fishing with ... and I thought, 'If fish could eat them, maybe we could, too,' " Lauren says.

Friends at Villa Madonna Academy promised her $20 if she would eat one in front of them, but she couldn't find any cicadas at the time, she says.

"She'd kind of a tough kid," says Lauren's dad, Don Webster. "She's not afraid of anything."

You don't say.

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E-mail kgutierrez@enquirer.com