Eating Viet Nam: Dispatches from a Blue Plastic Table

by Graham Holliday

Try as she might, this virtually English-fluent woman hadn’t been able to translate “sá sùng” to my satisfaction. “It’s kind of a worm. It comes from the sea.” “An eel?” “No.” “A sea slug?” “No, no . . . Ôi giời ơi,” she sighed in Vietnamese, using the oft-heard expression used to signify exasperation at, well, everything. Kind of like “Oh my god,” “Jesus Christ,” and “Oh, for crying out loud, you have GOT to be kidding me,” all rolled into one. She took me to the market around the corner to show me the bag of dried worms, with the label “sá sùng” stuck on the outside. “They’re very expensive, these ones. They make sure there’s no sand in them.” I was still none the wiser. Only years later, after copious amounts of research and countless dead ends, bad leads, and just plain wrong turns, I discovered that, in English, “sá sùng” means “peanut worm.” Any wiser? No, me neither, though I do now know that peanut worms live under the sand and are harvested at low tide.