Iquitos

All across Peru, street vendors sell anticuchos: marinated offal—usually beef hearts—skewered and grilled over charcoal. In the Amazonian city of Iquitos, surrounded by river and jungle, you’ll find a special type of anticucho called suri. These are small grubs—the fat larvae of the palm weevil, which feeds on palm trees throughout the nearby jungle. Their abundance makes them a particularly sustainable snack. On the streets of Iquitos, vendors marinate them in spices and grill them, skewered, over open flames. They’re at their best eaten hot, when some pick up the taste of hazelnuts and butter. Some cooks also fry them with green plantains, in a dish called chicharrón de suri.

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You can find anticuchos de suri at the Mercado Belén, an enormous covered market on the bank of the Itaya River, a tributary of the Amazon. Products at this market change by the day and even the hour, including spices, live animals, meat cuts, produce brought down the river by canoe, medicinal plants, and churos, the giant Amazonian snails that indigenous communities harvest when the river floods, and which sometimes pop up on fine-dining menus in Lima. It’s a bustling and intense introduction to Iquitos, the world’s largest city that cannot be reached by road. (A handful of low-cost carriers fly daily from Lima.)