Golden cicadas should be eaten soon; the elders say that after the Start of Autumn they can no longer be eaten.
In our area, before the golden cicada molts it is called a pazha, and after molting it is called a cicada. Below, let's take a look at whether pazha and cicadas can still be eaten after the Start of Autumn.
Can pazha be eaten after the Start of Autumn?
Before the golden cicada molts, it is a treasure in the countryside. Women, the elderly and children from a whole village would carry flashlights, and some would even carry a battery and install a xenon lamp and run all over the orchards, just to catch some pazha to take home and steam, stir-fry or deep-fry. The elders say that after the Start of Autumn golden cicadas can no longer be eaten, and this is not without scientific basis.
The first reason is that in summer more of a person's blood flows through the limbs and less through the internal organs. Just after the Start of Autumn the weather turns slightly cooler, and a person's spleen and stomach are at their weakest. At this time the diet should mainly consist of warm-natured foods to nourish the spleen and stomach; this is the principle behind "eat radish in winter and ginger in summer". The skin of the pazha is sweet and cold in nature in traditional Chinese medicine, so continuing to eat a lot of it at this time is indeed bad for the function of the spleen and stomach.
The second reason is that pazha crawl out of the soil starting in June, and by the Start of Autumn their numbers drop greatly. From the perspective of continued reproduction, leaving the pazha a way to survive is not a bad thing for oneself either. Older people value leaving a margin in everything they do; their life experience has taught them deeply the lose-lose outcome of draining a pond to catch all the fish. So pazha cannot be eaten after the Start of Autumn not because of anything about themselves, but for the sake of continued reproduction next year and one's own stomach and intestines, one should eat as little as possible.
Can cicadas be eaten after the Start of Autumn?
There are also many people who eat cicadas, just far fewer than those who eat pazha. When Kexue Xingnong was little, they even ate dung beetles; by comparison, cicadas are nothing. Cicadas can also be eaten after the Start of Autumn, but it is not advisable to eat much of them, for two reasons.
The first is also because they are cold in nature, and eating too many is bad for the spleen and stomach.
The second is that after the Start of Autumn cicadas have already passed their egg-laying period, the shell on their body surface has thickened, and the nutrients in their bodies have dropped sharply. They are not quite the same as grasshoppers; grasshoppers fatten up after autumn, and grasshoppers that have not laid eggs are even fatter. So from a nutritional standpoint, cicadas at this time should not be eaten: the taste is poor and the nutrition is lacking.