Anything That Moves (6 page)

At the conference, Dunkel talked about her frustration working in West Africa, where for decades European and American entomologists, through programs like USAID and the British Desert Locust Control Organization, have killed grasshoppers and locusts, which are complete proteins, in order to preserve the incomplete proteins in millet, wheat, barley, sorghum, and maize. Her field work in Mali focuses on the role of grasshoppers in the diets of children, who, for cultural reasons, do not eat chicken or eggs. Grasshoppers contain essential amino acids and serve as a crucial buffer against kwashiorkor, a protein deficiency that impedes physical and neurological development. In the village where Dunkel works, kwashiorkor is on the rise; in recent years, nearby fields have been planted with cotton, and pesticide use has intensified. Mothers now warn their children not to collect the grasshoppers, which they rightly fear may be contaminated.

Mainly, the entomophagists bemoaned the prejudice against insects. “In our minds, they're associated with filth,” Heather Looy, a psychologist who has studied food aversions, said over dinner after the symposium. “They go dirty places, but so do fungi, and we eat
those all the time. And you
don't want to know about
crabs and shrimp and lobster.” Crabs, shrimp, and
lobster are, like insects, arthropods—but instead of
eating fresh lettuces and
flowers, as many insects do,
they scavenge debris from the ocean floor.

This injustice—lobster is a delicacy, while vegetarian crustaceans like wood lice are unfit for civilized man—is a centerpiece of the literature of entomophagy.
Why Not Eat Insects
?, an 1885 manifesto by Vincent M. Holt, which is the founding document of the movement, expounds upon the vile habits of the insects of the sea. “The lobster, a creature consumed in incredible quantities at all the highest tables in the land, is such a foul feeder that, for its sure capture, the experienced fisherman will bait his lobster-pot with putrid flesh or fish which is too far gone even to attract a crab,” he writes.

As it is, contemporary Westerners tend to associate insects with filth, death, and decay, and, because some insects feed on human blood, their consumption is often seen as cannibalism by proxy. Holt takes pains to stress that the insects he recommends for eating—caterpillars, grasshoppers, slugs—are pure of this taint. “My insects are all vegetable feeders, clean, palatable, wholesome, and decidedly more particular in their feeding than ourselves,” he writes. “While I am confident that they will never condescend to eat
us,
I am equally confident that, on finding out how good they are, we shall some day right gladly cook and eat
them
.”


Holt's compelling, albeit Swiftian, argument addresses the food problems of his day—“What a pleasant change from the labourer's unvarying meal of bread, lard, and bacon, or bread and lard without bacon, would be a good dish of fried cockchafers or grasshoppers”—but he is innocent of the nuances of food marketing. Among the sample menus he supplies are offerings like “Boiled Neck of Mutton with Wire-worm Sauce and Moths on Toast.” At dinner in San Diego, it occurred to me that this naïveté had carried down. I was sitting next to Lou Sorkin, a forensic entomologist at the American Museum of Natural History who is also an expert on bedbugs, probably the most loathed insect in the United States today. He had arrived at his latest culinary discovery, he said, while experimenting with mediums for preserving maggots collected from murder victims. Realizing that citrus juice might denature proteins as effectively as a chemical solution, and might be more readily available in the field, he soaked large sarcophagid maggots in baths of grapefruit, lemon, lime, and pomelo juice, and
voilà
! Maggot ceviche. “It's a little chewy,” he said. “But tasty.”

•   •   •

F
ood preferences are highly local, often irrational, and defining: a Frenchman is a frog because he considers their legs food and the person who calls him one does not. In Santa María Atzompa, a community in Oaxaca where grasshoppers toasted with garlic, chili, and lime are a favorite treat, locals have traditionally found shrimp repulsive. “They would say ‘some people' eat it, meaning ‘the coastal people,'” Ramona Pérez, an anthropologist at San Diego State University, says. When she made scampi for a family there, she told me, they were appalled; the mother, who usually cooked with her, refused to help, and the daughters wouldn't eat. The coast is less than a hundred miles away.

Eighty percent of the world eats bugs. Australian Aborigines like witchetty grubs, which, according to the authors of
Man Eating Bugs,
taste like “nut-flavored scrambled eggs and mild mozzarella, wrapped in a phyllo dough pastry.” Mealworms are factory-farmed in China; in Venezuela, children roast tarantulas. Besides, as any bug-eater will tell you, we are all already eating bugs, whether we mean to or not. According to the FDA, which publishes a handbook on “defect levels” acceptable in processed food, frozen or canned spinach is not considered contaminated until it has fifty aphids, thrips, or mites per hundred grams. Peanut butter is allowed to have thirty insect fragments per hundred grams, and chocolate is OK up to sixty. In each case, the significance of the contamination is given as “aesthetic.”

In fresh vegetables, insects are inevitable. One day, cleaning some lettuce, I was surprised by an emerald-green pentagon with antennae: a stinkbug. I got rid of it immediately—force of habit. But daintiness about insects has true consequences. As Tom Turpin, an entomologist at Purdue University, said, “Attitudes in this country result in more pesticide use, because we're scared about an aphid wing in our spinach.”

The antipathy that Europeans and their descendants display toward eating insects is stubborn, and mysterious. Insect consumption is in our cultural heritage. The Romans ate beetle grubs reared on flour and wine; ancient Greeks ate grasshoppers. Leviticus, by some interpretations, permits the eating of locusts, grasshoppers, and crickets. (The rest are unkosher.) The manna eaten by Moses on his way out of Egypt is widely believed to have been honeydew, the sweet excrement of scale insects. Turpin thinks it comes down to expedience. Unlike bugs found in the tropics, those found in Europe do not grow big enough to make good food, so there is no culinary tradition, and therefore no infrastructure, to support the practice. He told me, “If there were insects out there the size of pigs, I guarantee you we'd be eating them.”

•   •   •

T
he next stinkbug I came across I ate. It was lightly fried, and presented on a slice of apple, whose flavor it is said to resemble. (I found it a touch medicinal.) This was in a one-story white clapboard house in the West Adams neighborhood of Los Angeles, with a skateboard half-pipe in the backyard. The house had been rented by Daniella Martin and Dave Gracer, two advocates of entomophagy, under false pretenses. “We told them we were scientists,” Martin said, giggling. In fact, Martin, who used to be an Internet game-show host, writes a blog called
Girl Meets Bug
; she and Gracer, an English instructor who travels the country lecturing on entomophagy and has been writing an epic poem about insects for the past fourteen years, were in town to compete in a cooking competition at the Natural History Museum's annual bug fair.

Martin, who is in her mid-thirties, with a heart-shaped face and a telegenic smile, stood at the counter in the small kitchen pulling embryonic drones—bee brood—from honeycomb. They were for bee patties, part of a “Bee L T” sandwich she was going to enter in the competition. But, finding them irresistible, she fried up a few to snack on. “It tastes like bacon,” she said rapturously. “I'm going to eat the whole plate unless someone gets in there.” I did: the drones, dripping in butter and lightly coated with honey from their cells, were fatty and a little bit sweet, and, like everything chitinous, left me with a disturbing aftertaste of dried shrimp.

Gracer opened the freezer and inspected his bugs: housefly pupae, cicadas, and, his favorite, ninety-dollar-a-pound katydids from Uganda. “They're very rich, almost buttery,” he said. “They almost taste as if they've gone around the bend.”

“Dave, where's the tailless whip scorpion?” Martin said, and Gracer produced an elegantly armored black creature with a foreleg like a calligraphy flourish. “I'm thinking about doing a tempura type of fry and a spicy mayonnaise,” Martin, who also worked for a number of years in a Japanese restaurant, said. First, she flash-fried it to soften the exoskeleton, and then she dipped it in tempura batter. To her knowledge, no one had ever before eaten a tailless whip scorpion. “All right, people, let's make history,” she said, using a pair of chopsticks to lower it back into the pan, where it sizzled violently. I decided right there on a new policy, one I thought would pass muster with Gold: I will eat disgusting things, but only those with long established culinary traditions.

When the scorpion was finished, she put it on a plate, and she and Gracer sat down on a couch to feast on what looked like far too much bug for me, and yet not nearly enough to satisfy hunger. Gracer pulled off a pincer. “There's something—that white stuff—that's meat!” he cried, pointing to a speck of flesh. “That's meat!” Martin repeated excitedly, and exhorted him to try it. He tasted; she tasted. “Fish,” Gracer said. “It has the consistency of fish.” Martin split a leg apart and nibbled. In a few bites, they had eaten all there was. “That was really good,” she said.

The following morning, in a tent on the front lawn of the Natural History Museum, Gracer faced Zack (the Cajun Bug Chef) Lemann, an established bug-cooker from New Orleans, who dazzled the judges—most of them children—with his “odonate hors d'oeuvres,” fried wild-caught dragonflies served on sautéed mushrooms with Dijon-soy butter. Children are often seen as the great hope of entomophagy, because of their openness to new foods, but even they are not without prejudices. Gracer, who presented stinkbug-and-kale salad, had neglected to account for the fact that kids don't like kale.

A five-year-old approached Lemann afterward. “Excuse me, can I eat a dragonfly?” he said. Lemann cooked one for him. The boy picked the batter off, revealing a wing as elaborately paned as a cathedral window, and then bit into it: his first bug. His little brother, who was three, came over and asked for a bite. “Good,” he pronounced.

“Who's going to eat the head?” their mother asked.

“I will,” the five-year-old said. “Once somebody licks the mustard off.”

The last round of the day matched Martin against Gracer. He was making Ugandan-katydid-and-grilled-cheese sandwiches. Drawing on her Japanese-restaurant experience, Martin decided to make a spider roll, using a rose-haired tarantula bought from a pet store. She held up the spider and burned off its hair with a lighter, and then removed its abdomen. “The problem with eating an actual spider roll, made with crab, is that they're bottom feeders,” she said. “This spider probably ate only crickets, which ate only grass.” She whipped up a sauce and added a few slices of cucumber, and then presented her dish to the judges, warning them brightly to “be very careful of the fangs!”

A young girl with curly hair lunged eagerly at the plate. “If it's in sushi, I'll eat it,” she said. When she had tried a piece, she declared, “It's sushi. With spiders. It's awesome.”

•   •   •

F
our-fifths of the animal species on earth are insects, and yet food insects are not particularly easy to find. Home cooks can call Fred Rhyme, of Rainbow Mealworms, who provided the Madagascar hissing cockroaches for
Fear Factor
. He sells more than a billion worms a year; the sign at the edge of his farm, a conglomeration of twenty-three trailers, shotgun houses, and former machine shops in South Los Angeles, says, “Welcome to Worm City, Compton, Cal., 90220½. Population: 990,000,000.” The farm supplies six hundred thousand worms a week to the San Diego Zoo. “It's mostly animals we feed,” Rhyme's wife, Betty, who is the company's president, told me. “The people are something of an oddity.”

I wasn't in the market for more mealworms. I had gone to visit Florence Dunkel, the entomologist, in Montana, and eaten plenty of them, fried up in butter, in her kitchen. They smelled of mushrooms and tasted of sunflower seeds. The flavor was unobjectionable, but not reason enough to eat something that reminded me of the time I was halfway through a sleeve of extra-crumbly Ritz crackers before I realized that the crumbs were moving. I wanted to see if bugs could be transcendent, and I knew who would know. “One of the biggest successes of the local New Cocktailian movement is the mezcal-based Donaji at Rivera downtown, which Julian Cox serves in a rocks glass rimmed with toasted-grasshopper salt,” Jonathan Gold wrote to me. I duly went to the restaurant and ordered the Donaji, a $14 cocktail named
after a Zapotec princess. The salt tasted like
Jane's Krazy Mixed-Up Salt,
crushed Bac-Os, and fish-food flakes; the bartender recommended it as a rub for grilled meat.

Gold also mentioned that I might try Laurent Quenioux, at Bistro LQ, an old acquaintance of his. Gold's 2006 review of Quenioux's wild hare stew—“a soft, gloriously stinky Scottish hare stewed in something approximating the traditional
foie gras
–inflected blood”—was one of the pieces for which he won the Pulitzer. To me, Gold wrote, “He occasionally has
escamoles
, giant ant eggs, on the menu. They're very seasonal, early spring I think, so you'd have to call.” It was winter. I would have to wait.

Escamoles
are not actually eggs but immature
Liometopum apiculatum
. A delicacy since Aztec times—they were used as tribute to Moctezuma—they are still a prized ingredient in high-end Mexico City restaurants, where they are known colloquially as Mexican caviar. Exquisitely subtle, palest beigy-pink, knobbly as a seed pearl, they command a market price of around $70 a pound.