Anything That Moves (5 page)

In 1968, Craig Claiborne, the food editor of
The
New York Times
, wrote with amusement about Reese's elephant meat, which “the foremost food authority in Florida” was planning to serve in an omelet at her husband's restaurant in Miami. (Her source: Bloomie's.) The following year, the federal Endangered Species Conservation Act was passed, significantly expanding the prohibitions against selling certain animals, and Reese's swashbuckling period came to an abrupt end. In 1973, Congress signed the Endangered Species Act, a broader law that is still in place. That year, after tins of Reese's smoked whale meat were discovered for sale in the Gourmet Foods Shop at Macy's in New York, investigators confiscated a large supply from a Reese warehouse in the Bronx, fined the company, and made it promise not to sell any more endangered species in the state.

As the market changed, Kushner tried to live down his association with the “gimmicky” foods that had set Reese apart from its competitors. Kushner saw food both as a mark of status and as a democratizer, a powerful social vehicle for the eighties striver. “Tonight you can eat as well as Rockefeller,” he'd say. In 1982, he told
The New York Times
,
“When people can't afford mink coats, Cadillacs, or beautiful homes, they reward themselves with good cheeses they can afford. It's accessible luxury.” By then, specialty foods had moved out of the “gourmet ghetto” and onto the supermarket's main shelves—the Grey Poupon alongside the ballpark mustard—and America had changed because of it. There were limits—Kushner didn't think
balut
would ever “go down”—but people had accepted previously spurned exotics like raw oysters, rabbit, and mussels.
Kushner took to greeting visitors to the food show by saying, “Welcome to Wonderland, where today's specialties become tomorrow's staples!”

•   •   •

I
n overcoming the resistance to certain foods, Frederick J. Simoons, the author of the classic text on culinary taboos
Eat Not This Flesh,
says timing is everything, and there is usually more than one factor at play. When Emperor Meiji ate beef—a sacrilege in Buddhist Japan—it was because the country was ready to embrace the West. Noritoshi Kanai, the eighty-eight-year-old president of Mutual Trading Company, which imports gold flakes and matsutake essence to sell to high-end sushi restaurants like Masa and Nobu, introduced sushi to the United States in the 1960s. Because sushi is raw and handled without gloves in front of the customer, everyone told him that the American public would never accept it. The convergence of three factors, he says, changed their minds: the food pyramid, which emphasized fish; the rise of the Japanese car; and
Sh
ō
gun,

 the best-selling novel by James Clavell.

Insects, the wiggly, bridge-party shockers that helped get America excited about eating, are back, and this time around they may, like Evian, be here to stay. The conditions are promising. America's food intelligentsia bemoans the industrial-scale farming and food processing of the present, and forsees a
Mad Max
future. Insects are danger-tinged but eco-friendly, and little explored as food. Once a staple on
Fear Factor,
they were featured on
Top Chef Masters
a few seasons ago; the winning dish was tempura-fried crickets with sunchoke-carrot purée and blood-orange vinaigrette. During the London Olympics, the celebrated Danish chef René Redzepi, whose restaurant, Noma, has repeatedly been named the best restaurant in the world, served a tasting menu at Claridge's, the five-star Mayfair hotel. The eight-course meal cost more than $300 a head and featured chilled live ants, flown from Copenhagen, on cabbage with crème fraiche. “When you bite into the ants, they release the flavor of lemongrass; what you taste is light and citrusy, in contrast to the edible soil you have just consumed,” the
Bloomberg
food critic wrote.

Guelaguetza, the Oaxacan
restaurant opened by Bricia Lopez's parents, serves a scrumptious plate of
chapulines a la Mexicana—
grasshoppers


sautéed with onions, jalapeños, and tomatoes, and
 topped with avocado and Oaxacan string cheese. Lopez says that more and more Anglo
hipsters—Jonathan Gold readers—are coming in to
order them. “Eating grasshoppers is a thing you do
here,” she said. “Like, ‘Oh
my God, I ate a grasshopper,
woo
.'”
She went on, “There's more of a cool factor involved. It's not just ‘Let's go get a burrito.' It's ‘Let's get a mole'
or ‘Let's get a grasshopper.'” According to the FDA, insects sold as human food must be raised specifically for the purpose in a facility that follows “good manufacturing processes”; “wild-crafting” is not condoned, for fear of pesticide contamination or disease, nor is diverting bugs from the pet-food stream. The USDA, which typically handles meat, doesn't contemplate insects at all. Until a citation from the health department prompted them to set up a certified facility in Oaxaca, the Lopezes got the
chapulines
they served at Guelaguetza from friends and relatives, who packed them in their carry-ons when they visited from Mexico.

The contemporary vogue for bugs reflects not only a desire for novelty but also a degree of pragmatism, and that may guarantee their staying power. José Andrés, a winner of the James Beard Foundation's Outstanding Chef award, makes a very popular
chapulín
taco—sautéed shallots, deglazed in tequila; chipotle paste; and Oaxacan grasshoppers, in a handmade tortilla—at his Washington, D.C., restaurant Oyamel. He sees bug-eating as both a gastronomic experience (he recommends the mouthfeel of a small, young, crispy
chapulín
)
and a matter of survival. “We need to feed humanity in a sustainable way,” he says. “Those who know how to produce protein will have an edge over everyone else. World War Three will be over control of water and food, and the insects may be an answer.”

According to the ecologist Daniel Pauly, Mexico's tradition of insect-eating arose from a lack of alternatives. Before the arrival of the Europeans, there were neither cows nor horses nor other large mammals that could be easily domesticated. The same went for the rest of Latin America: this is why Peruvians, and tourists to Cuzco, eat guinea pigs. “Even the Aztec killing machine was not able to reduce the population sufficiently,” he says. “That Mexico developed a taste for bugs may be related to population pressure.” He went on, “Why are we even contemplating eating insects? Because we are gradually running out of things to eat.”

•   •   •

D
emographers have projected that by 2050 the world's population will have increased to nine billion, and the demand for meat will grow with it, particularly in dense, industrializing countries like China and India. In 2010—a year in which, according to the United Nations, nearly a billion people suffered from chronic hunger—the journal
Science
published a special issue on food security, and included a piece on entomophagy, the unappealing name by which insect-eating properly goes. Acknowledging that the notion might be “unappetizing to many,” the editors wrote, “The quest for food security may require us all to reconsider our eating habits, particularly in view of the energy consumption and environmental costs that sustain those habits.”

From an ecological perspective, insects have a lot to recommend them. They are renowned for their small “foodprint”; being cold-blooded, they are about four times as efficient at converting feed to meat as are cattle, which waste energy keeping themselves warm. Ounce for ounce, many have the same amount of protein as beef—fried grasshoppers have three times as much—and are rich in micronutrients like iron and zinc. Genetically, they are so distant from humans that there is little likelihood of diseases jumping species, as swine flu did. They are natural recyclers, capable of eating old cardboard, manure, and by-products from food manufacturing. And insect husbandry offers an alternative to the problem of factory farming: bugs
like
teeming, and thrive in filthy, crowded conditions.

In late 2010, a group of scientists at Wageningen University, in the Netherlands, published a paper concluding that insects reared for human consumption produce significantly lower quantities of greenhouse gases than do cattle and pigs. “This study therefore indicates that insects could serve as a more environmentally friendly alternative for the production of animal protein,” the paper said. One of its authors was Arnold van Huis, an entomologist who is working to establish a market for insect-based products in the Netherlands, with funding from the Dutch government; the agriculture ministry recently gave him a million euros to research insect husbandry. “We have a food crisis, especially a meat crisis, and people are starting to realize that we need alternatives, and insects are just an excellent alternative,” van Huis said.

On a trip to Africa, in 1995, when van Huis was on sabbatical, he traveled to a dozen countries, interviewing locals about their relationship with insects. Half the people he spoke
with talked about eating
them, and he finally overcame their reluctance—born of centuries of colonial opprobrium—to share
some with him. “I had termites, which were roasted, and they were excellent,” he
said. When he got home, he offered a bag of termites
to Marcel Dicke, the head of his department. Dicke
liked them, and the two men started a popular lecture series that addressed insects' potential as a food source.
After van Huis and Dicke organized an insect festival that drew twenty thousand people, they were approached by several mealworm and cricket farmers who had been serving the
pet-food industry but were interested in diversifying.
“We know that Western
peoples have some difficulties psychologically with ingesting insects, so we are
looking at some ways of introducing them into food
so that people will no longer recognize them,” van
Huis said. Insect flour was
one option. “Another possibility is that you can grind insects and make them into a hot dog or a fish stick,” he said. Together, van Huis and Dicke helped get mealworms and processed snacks like BugNuggets into the Dutch grocery chain Sligro.

The Dutch are, for reasons of geography, especially concerned about the effects of global warming; they are also progressive when it comes to food development. But entrepreneurs in the United States are starting to explore edible insects, too. Matthew Krisiloff, a student at the University of Chicago, recently started a company called Entom Foods, which is working on deshelling insects using pressurization technology in the hope of selling the meat in cutlet form.

“The problem is the
ick
factor—the eyes, the wings, the legs,” he said. “It's not as simple as hiding it in a bug nugget. People won't accept it beyond the novelty. When you think of a chicken you think of a chicken breast, not the eyes, wings, and beak. We're trying to do the same thing with insects, create a stepping-stone, so that when you get a bug nugget you think of the bug steak, not the whole animal.” But before he can bring a product to market, he must overcome a daunting technical challenge. Insect protein does not take the form of muscle, but is, as he put it, “goopy.”

In Dicke's opinion, simply changing the language surrounding food insects could go a long way toward solving the problem that Westerners have with them. “Maybe we should stop telling people they're eating insects,” he said. “If you say it's mealworms, it makes people think of ringworm. So stop saying ‘worm.' If we use the Latin names, say it's a
Tenebrio
quiche, it sounds much more fancy, and it's part of the marketing.” Another option, Dicke said, is to cover the bugs in chocolate, because people will eat anything covered in chocolate.

•   •   •

T
he practice of ethical entomophagy started haphazardly. In 1974, Gene DeFoliart, who was the chair of entomology at the University of Wisconsin, was asked by a colleague to recommend someone who could talk about edible insects as part of a symposium on unconventional protein sources. Then, as now, entomology was more concerned with insect eradication than cultivation, and, not finding a willing participant, DeFoliart decided to take on the project himself. He began his talk—and the paper he eventually published—with a startling statement: “C. F. Hodge (1911) calculated that a pair of houseflies beginning operations in April could produce enough flies, if all survived, to cover the earth forty-seven feet deep by August,” he said. “If one can reverse for a moment the usual focus on insects as enemies of man, Hodge's layer of flies represents an impressive pile of animal protein.”

DeFoliart, who died in early 2013, envisioned a place for edible insects as a luxury item. The larvae of the wax moth (
Galleria
mellonella
)
seemed to him to be poised to become the next escargot, which in the late eighties represented a three-hundred-million-dollar-a-year business in the United States. “Given a choice, New York diners looking for adventure and willing to pay $22 for half a roasted free-range chicken accompanied by a large pile of shoestring potatoes might well prefer a smaller pile of
Galleria
at the same price,” he wrote. He and a handful of colleagues, including Florence Dunkel, now a leading entomophagist and a professor at Montana State University, in Bozeman, began to study and promote the potential of what they called “mini-livestock.” In
The Food Insects Newsletter,
their journal, they reported the results of nutritional analyses and assessed the efficiency of insects like crickets—the most delectable of which, entomophagists are fond of pointing out, belong to the genus
Gryllus
.

A couple of years ago, a group of DeFoliart's disciples gathered at a resort in San Diego for a symposium on entomophagy at the annual conference of the Entomological Society of America. Because there is no significant funding available for entomophagy research, it has never been taken seriously by most professional entomologists. Dunkel, who in her half century in academia has many times heard colleagues discourage interested graduate students, often finds herself at odds with others in her field. It was a relief, then, to be among the like-minded. “Your soap-moth-pupae chutney—I'll never forget how that tasted!” she said, introducing a colleague from the Insectarium, in Montreal, which holds a bug banquet every other year. The entomophagists hoped to capitalize on the momentum they perceived. “We don't have to be the kooky, nerdy entomologists who eat bugs because we're crazy,” an entomologist from the University of Georgia said. “Twenty years ago, sushi was the
eww
factor; you did not see sushi in grocery stores. Now it's the cultural norm.”