How to Eat Fried Worms started out as a children's novel written in1973 by Thomas Rockwell. It was later turned into a CBS Storybreak episode (mid-1980s) and is now a 2006 movie of the same name.

Censorship Attempts.

Because of the novel's content, the idea of eating worms as part of a bet is thought to be disgusting by some; it has been the frequent target of censors and appears on the American Library Association list of the 100 Most Frequently Challenged Books of 1990-2000 at number ninety six. I love this fact, however. Censorship attempts are always indicators to me that there must be something extraordinary going on. It is good to remember the Bible itself had a history of being targeted for burning. Pardon the pun, but censorship (book burnings, etc.) only kindles the interest in the books.

What the Story is About.
A boy named Billy makes a $50 bet that he can eat 15 earthworms in 15 days. He and his friend, Tom, devise several ingenious methods of making the worms more palatable, whilst the two boys who talked him into the bet, Alan and Joe, try several schemes to make them lose.

Back to the Censorship issue.

Simple story. Fun story. Gross to be sure. But, hey, no big deal here. Why the interest in censorship? It is interesting to note some of the other children’s stories that have faced the fires of censorship...

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, The Chocolate War, Goosebumps, James and the Giant Peach, Peter Pan

 ...and there are more!

But hey, come on, let’s end all censorship and restore Free Speech and the Free Press. When Huck Finn is facing the fires of censorship hell, it’s time to realize the utter nonsense censorship is. It reminds me of Nazi Germany and even the Senator Joe McCarthy era in America. Or even, dare I say it, the G. W. Bush era (e.g. pulling PBS funding, imposing broadcast fines on the Janet Jackson’s incident, curtailing public showings of Saving Private Ryan, dragging the NY Times into court, digitally removing nipple bumps from sweaters on Desperate Housewives, to name a few). Utter nonsense. What is next? Removing the words, ‘piss’, ‘dung’ and ‘damn’ and the entire ‘Song of Solomon” from the King James Bible? Can Bible publishers be sued by a FCC-Bush-style government for making such literature as the KJV Bible available to children? 

It concerns me a lot.

“All censorships exist to prevent any one from challenging current conceptions and existing institutions. All progress is initiated by challenging current conceptions, and executed by supplanting existing institutions. Consequently the first condition of progress is the removal of censorships.” -- George Bernard Shaw (1856 - 1950)

The reason we have a Bible today is because people were willing to risk their lives, and did, for a Free Press, and for Religious Freedom. They killed the prophets didn’t they? And wasn’t the killing of Jesus a form of censorship? (“Assassination is the extreme form of censorship”--George Bernard Shaw). Let’s end all forms of censorship and move on!

 Again, “the first condition of progress is the removal of censorships.”

Long live How to Eat Fried Worms and may it always serve to remind us of how precious our liberties are, even the liberties to eat fried worms!