This SC couple just held a dinner party with only cicadas on the menu. Watch the taste testing

Josh Wicker asked his wife and seven friends to get dressed up in their finest whimsical attire and come over for a dinner party of specially prepared cicadas.

Yep, you heard that right. Cicadas.

And they all went.

In fact, Wicker, who lives in Greenwood, said he had many more people who wanted to eat cicadas than he could accommodate for his YouTube channel “Y’all, Be Lookin.”

The channel is named for Wicker’s dad who usually took the long way home from eating out to see what they could see along the backroads of Sanford, North Carolina. The treks instilled in Wicker an interest in wildlife biology, which he studied at Erskine College and where he met his wife, now a physician.

He introduced the video saying, “Today we’re going to be eating cicadas … and we have trash cans.”

Wicker said he thought a video on cicada eating would draw attention to the fact that people all over the world eat very different things.

He also knew he needed to spice things up a bit for his Southern guests.

Enter cicadas in a blanket, bacon-wrapped cicadas, Cajun fried cicadas and the truly inspired praline cicadas (like Stuckeys but not).

“Lipstick on a pig,” he said.

Wicker collected the bugs after they molted but before their bodies hardened and killed them in the freezer. They were easy to find what with the invasion of the 13-year Brood XIX underway now.

The friends were two physicians, a high school principal, a woodworker, a friend from his board game group, a friend of his wife and a 10-year-old who brought impeccable comedic timing to spitting the so-called food into the trash can.

(At least he tried it.)

The guests rated the various forms of insect preparation from two to 10, with most getting a five. Guests described the bugs variously as tasting like peanut butter, baklava and jerky. The pralines were definitely the star.

Nigel, the woodworker, wondered if he should eat the face or butt end first. He chose butt.

Mary Hart, Wicker’s wife, who said she had eaten termites and chicken intestines before, said, “What is wrong with me? Honestly, I don’t hate any of these.”

Her friend, Lauren, was the only one who actually gagged.

Austin, the principal, said. “I think I tasted bug.”

But the piece de resistance was left to Wicker himself, when at the end of the video he eats a live cicada.

“It was pretty terrible,” he said. ”Gagged pretty bad on the wings.”