Serious Eats - seriouseats.com

Conditioning.

We're socialised to regard insects in the neighbourhood of as food revolting and unsanitary. Insects are associated with garbage, with decomposing food, or with solid animal waste, and, by association, with the less charming diseases; they're regarded as the food for which humanity has become too sophisticated, has outgrown. Still, in plenty of places, they do eat insects at various stages of growth, and it's almost a dead certainty that early humans relied on them heavily as protein source, since even small vertebrates can be difficult to catch. Part of the problem may be that most of the readily available insects in urban areas are not only small, but often associated with dirt (cockroaches, flies). Insects that damage crops are also quite small. And, I'm guessing that the beef and poultry industries would not be exactly supportive of any efforts in this direction.

Still... if I knew it was cleanly raised, I think I could be interested in a batter-fried, not-too chitinous insect... I'd be willing to have a go!

I ate a chocolate-covered cricket once. It had a bitter bit, and it sure wasn't the chocolate. Anyway, like mongoose said--conditioning. My childhood friends and I would do it to each other--one's family came from India, one had a Laotian mother, and I was Filipino--we'd make faces at each other's food. You eat what you're familiar with, and anything totally foreign is gross.

I remember coming here to AZ for my first year of college back in 94 and overhearing some college-aged women in the local grocery store grossing out over sushi and wondering who would eat that "crap" (and no, it wasn't in relation to the fact that it was grocery store sushi, but raw fish). This was a handful of years before sushi became The Thing To Do.

Reminds me of how I read about vegetarian Indians moving to the UK then suffering from health issues caused by protein (?) difficiencies. Turned out that back home, these vegetarians were getting a decent amount of protien from the bugs in their veggies, but because the insect/pest standards of veggies in the UK are so much more strict, they didn't get that extra boost once they moved to the UK.

Many eastern countries have no issues with eating bugs. Intellectually, I don't either, but I still don't really see myself munching on ants any time soon.

@Karen Resta: LOL. Nice link.

I watched Bourdain with a group of natives, picking a certain insect off a certain bush, removing the legs and taking them back to the village to be cooked. He was having trouble swallowing their food and said the insects were the best thing he tasted there. The natives didn't just look for crawling insects, they knew exactly what, where and how. We're very fortunate that we don't have to resort to that, unless we choose to with bottom dwellers.

Insects may never be more than subsistence fare for me, but I'm always willing to be surprised: http://www.eatingintranslation.com/2008/01/order-insecta.html

There's a word for the act of not being able to see past one's own cultural nose but I can't think of it at the moment. Not even coffee is helping. A nice roasted locust might help, but I have none.

People in other parts of the world eat insects because they are available.
Because that is what there is to eat.

Grocery stores and packaged chickens and steaks from huge cattle grazed on wide-open plains are not available everywhere in the world, and what one has to eat - when one needs to eat - becomes delicious to those who eat it. Steak is no better than an insect to eat, in any moral or philosophic sense - nor is any vegetable or any other thing better to eat, when one is hungry with limited resources (which most peoples have been throughout history).

We can apply measurements of personal taste to things. These measurements are based on ideas that include our religions, our cultures, our tastebuds, and even in a major sense in any cookery in any culture we apply the measurement of class. People eat to aspire to a higher social level - and they do this act in the most public way they can to assure that their ideologic goal has been met.

In our country, the US, there are a certain amount of insect parts allowed in every box or can of food that is sold - a legal amount not to be exceeded as designated by the FDA. We do eat insects every day, for insect parts are measurably there in our foods, for insects are a part of the agricultural process. They can not be completely separated for an absolute aseptic purity of ideal. You eat them, I eat them. So if we are what we eat, we are insects too.

That's not to say that if I saw a bug running around in my soup I might not let out a little shriek.

But if I was in the right mood, I'd spoon him right up and eat him. I'd taste the crunch and savor. I'd think of my friends in Malaysia with their skewers of shiny glazed bugs for sale at the market, and I'd nod my head internally, saying a "hello" across the miles, and certainly across the inward-looking feelings of separateness that is held whenever one says "Ugh" and really means it, about anyone else's food anywhere in the world - the food that succors them, the food that is their history, the food that has kept body and soul alive.

Excuse me. My coffee (insect parts and all) is waiting.

I lost all patience with people dissing bugs as food when my son was in the fourth grade.

One day, a bug landed on his desk at school. Now this is a boy who never gets in trouble. This is also a boy who has two books on bugs as gastronomic items - one by the great Roald Dahl, one by another author who plays into the idea that boys might have that bugs are fun things, boyishly fun things.

So this day at school, my son grabbed the bug and chomped on it. He ate it.

His teacher had a fit. You might have thought he'd done any imaginable horrible act worthy of shame. She pulled him right out of the classroom, to the principles office and called me where she ranted on as if he'd committed a capital offense, finally calming down - finishing by telling me she would use the experience as a "teaching moment" at the end of the day so that other children would not do the same horrible act.

As I said, my patience with people who diss bugs as edible material is shot, gone, evaporated. I wrote a poem about my son's experience. It was named Bugaboo at first but I think I'm going to re-name it with a phrase near the end of the poem.

Which would be:

Small Litany

he'd flown in solo on runway of sun
flight pattern plotted clean
windowjamb cleared careening punchdrunk, he set down smackdab
flat out on the desk
with a bearing pugnacious, so attractively mean

fate met destiny
hand met mouth
boy and bug became one
crunch and salt slid down the boy's throat as he wriggled joyously bouncing with fun
children's burbling giggles unfurled like wild horses breaking pack
to classmates, he was humorous hero but to teacher, he was
serious flak

her thin hand trembled as it reached towards him
in fatmans belly prose
stretching gripping all human rings fell as caged claws did expose

a furry foot closed on his small round shoulder and while lifting him
she flew
out the door down the hall (was she trailing bits of goo?!)

at the principals office numbers were dialed a distant hello was heard
the briefest moment of silence stretched
then teachers voice it arched and purred
her crackling worry served itself up in
click clack screechy angered words
more chitter chatter
(ladled disapproval, with the wicked taste of sour milk curds)
telephone passed to the boy to take now it was his turn

he pressed his ear to the sticky black thing
what calming words might his mother bring?
why?
what! when? where! (the usual quartet) tell me, please NOW for your teacher is
really ugly when upset
it just tasted good mom said the little boy (his voice so strong so light)
it just tasted good
so I just took a bite!

in Colombia, they eat black ants
and golden beetles, too!
in Africa they chomp crunchy crickets (even in Timbuktu!)
I have a book on this you see, and I say if them,
then why not me?

it just tasted good he smiled
he turned from the phone to try to explain
teacher? it was just that it tasted good.

but her damp ancient eyes of kiln-dried onyx
snapped and skewed round and froze
and the putrid smell of dead snails reached air
and marshmallow webs extruded her nose

Not here! she clicked from loosed glittery wings
Not here! her stinger slashed gleaming and wild

then while merrily tapdancing a mad Sufi swing
she circled with red ink and the tip of her wing to contain! to corral!
this distasteful thing
one: Ideas
two: Reviled.

she perched on the desktop to continue the lesson, extracting her words like nectar from rose
here
we eat no sort of bugs
no sort of crawling flying things
none of those twenty-four-karat gold beetles
nor mean flying fitful fleas no velvet leggy vibrating spiders
nor aspiring actor ants and bees!
not even glad fireflies with their illuminating screams!
no rude and yappy intense mosquitoes or ridiculous crickets so crosseyed and cranky
nor even tipsy top-hatted grasshoppers shrieking full-blown in their Opera Extreme.
no showoff dancing centipede dainties nor monster truck four-wheeler waterbugs with built-in hydraulically operated wings

but most of all
not me.
here your understanding will be that
Nobody makes light meals of Me!
the small boy closed his smarting eyes as sounds of friends playing rose from outside
"I'm sorry" he quivered (maintaining some pride)

the grim dimmed room it moved and shifted with a sound
like a fragrant sigh
his sneakers held hard like statues to the floor but he found some courage and opened one eye

teacher was there in her regular clothes no insect attachments to see
just like a Usual Human she was, no more a Fearsome Monstrosity

he knew now what he had to do what he had to say
no escape! he realized there was to be a price to pay.
but all this time he'd been memorizing teacher's required

small litany
so speaking loud and speaking clear he performed his recital for teacher's ears

maybe? them . . . he said . . . but no, not me
here, no enlightening bugs for me
(oh but it did taste good! he smiled)

I kind of feel like making a rice crispy treat out of crickets now.

I guess this reasoning also applies to balut.
drastic at 12:36PM on 01/18/08

A very nice entree could be made with a balut center surrounded by mozzarella (like suppli sort of) then covered with cricket crispy shaped into any shape one wanted to. A boat? A fish? A faux lamb chop?

Truffled salt on the left, pink sea salt on the right.
Good to go.

I often wonder where Marinetti is when one really needs him.