Bugs: the other other other white meat

Two Heralders brave the Peabody Edible Insect exhibit while one stays home and cries like a baby.

Shawn Cheng/YH

Tastes great! Less filling!

This particular "restaurant" opened for the first and last time at the Peabody Museum during the Edible Insects weekend. So you, gentle reader, will just have to be jealous as I tell you about the cooking demonstration by David Gordon, author of the Eat-A-Bug cookbook. Nah-nah.

As Gordon nattered enthusiastically to a packed audience of mostly parents and children, I was a tad impatient. "Bring on the bugs!" I wanted to yell. It was all very interesting that the mopani worms which cover the trees in South Africa are an important cash crop, but I could see the little can of mealworms sitting on the demonstration table and, frankly, I was getting hungry.

It was a three-course, prix-fixe (free for Yalies) menu, and while the presentation was not exactly haute—paper cups and plastic spoons—there was a certain childish charm to it, probably accentuated by all the little kids running around and yelling, "I'm not going to eat that!" The starter was a warm salad with orzo and sautéed crickets, which Gordon cooked right in front of us. He started with crickets, stirred for approximately 45 seconds, and mixed in the orzo, chopped peppers, almonds and parsley. Since he used wingless nymph crickets, the sliced almonds added a crunchy texture. The crickets and their curly antennae looked very cute nestling in the orzo—they had a meaty taste, which was offset by the onions. My friend Anna didn't like them—they tasted "too fishy"—but I enjoyed the crickets a lot. I did feel, though, that the recipe definitely could have been improved with basil.

I didn't approve of the Scorpion Scallopini. Gordon cooked them with milk, cornmeal, and butter, and the thick batter was so sludgy that you couldn't taste the scorpions at all; you only ended up chewing their crunchy exoskeletons. For such a rare delicacy—the scorpions were imported from the Sinai desert—I felt that a simple stir-fry, possibly with oil, lemon juice, and chives, would have set off the scorpion's lobster-like flesh much more effectively. Dessert, though, was a success: white chocolate-chip and waxworm cookies. The cookies were rich and buttery and the roasted waxworms tasted like pistachio nuts. My friend Jim tagged along behind the server, grabbing cookies and stuffing them into his mouth. "These are really addictive," he said, spraying crumbs.

Yalies who missed the event shouldn't be too disappointed—it's easy to cook bugs yourself. "You can order crickets from Fluker Farms in Lousiana," Gordon said. "Or you can just buy them at any pet store." Gordon prefers to send away for cricket nymphs, though, which are younger and sweeter. It's even possible to take them to the dining hall, because they're microwaveable. "But don't cook crickets too long," he warned. "They'll explode." I think melted cheese would better suit a more robust insect like a maggot, and the taste of crickets would lend itself to steaming with broccoli and sesame oil.

Not only are bugs delicious, but they're an excellent source of protein (crickets), calcium (grasshoppers), and iron (termites). So I felt very proud of my accomplishments as I left the Peabody, munching a deliciously nutritious waxworm cookie, and proudly wearing a button which proudly stated, "I ate a bug club." —Zoë Konovalov

I catched a bug

Anyone who becomes squeamish at the sight of creatures with more than four legs probably avoided the Peabody Museum of Natural History on Sat., Sept. 25. The event's main attraction was Chef David George Gordon, author of Eat-a-Bug Cookbook—but the museum had plenty of other activities for those with not-so-adventurous palates. Volunteers painted faces and taught kids how to make butterfly puppets. Dr. Leonard Munstermann of the Yale School of Medicine spoke on backyard biodiversity, and Dr. William Krinsky gave a talk on forensic entomology called, "The Dead Can't Speak, But Their Maggots Can: Insects and Crime."

Among the most popular exhibits was the Insect Zoo, held in the Great Hall, where kids were able to get friendly with various types of bugs. "I liked the hissing cockroach, even though it didn't hiss," said Annie Linger, age seven, of New Haven. "I'm not scared of bugs. I held the centipede, and it felt rough when it crawled on my hand. The millipede tickled me and my brother." Annie's brother, Sam, also expressed enjoyment, but with fewer words than his sister. "I liked the centipede," he said. "It bites."

Not all of the visitors were as impressed by the insect zoo as were the Linger kids. "I have stuff at my house to catch bugs, and I already catched four of them. They're in my room," five-year-old Jordan Rothchild said. "I have a slug, two centipedes, and I don't know what kind of silver bug. I call it my tickle bug."

Young visitors were also enthusiastic about the interactive storytime with Bernice the Queen Bee, who explained how bees collect pollen, while her teenage assistants, Bibi and Bettylou, performed an interpretive dance. Five-year-old Ariel Ligowski of Bethel said that the storytime taught her "how bees eat. I learned that they stick their tongues out to collect pollen," she said, wagging her own tongue in the direction of a flower that Bernice had used as a prop.

The chief reason that the bug exhibit was so popular, according to Gordon, is because people are bored with "charismatic mega-fauna," or large animals such as elephants and tigers. "Because of things like the Discovery Channel, people have gotten blasé about seeing things like a lion eating a zebra. Now they want to see a praying mantis eating another bug." Six-year-old Evan DeCarlo offered another explanation: "Bugs are cool."

—Kate Moran

I will not eat it, Sam I am

I'm supposed to write about why bugs aren't appetizing. This is going to be difficult.

First off, I'd like to establish a little credibility. I once ate part of a bug. It tasted like salad dressing, which is not what you might have expected except that it was lurking like the Titanic in my iceberg lettuce at the Davenport dining hall. The manager seemed to feel pretty bad about the whole thing. He made me go to the basement with him to look at how clean the food was. At the time, I think I felt a little sorry for him; he seemed really to believe in the dining hall and its mission of sanitary blandness. But in retrospect, I think he felt a little sorry for me for worrying so much about a little bug that was probably the most wholesome morsel in the entire salad bar. In any case, he retired that year.

Another time I went to this theme restaurant in Beijing that specialized in "famine food." It seems China's idle rich like to recall those favorite moments in history when their people had to eat gross things. Standout dishes included ant soup, fried beetle, cockroach tongue, eye of tree bark, knee of grass (can humans digest grass?), and my personal favorite, Davenport dining hall salad. You can see why peasants made this stuff during famines: I didn't eat anything and still I wasn't hungry for weeks. Plus, it was the only restaurant I went to in China that didn't make me sick. I can honestly say that the simple act of not eating bugs is more wholesome than all the food in China and Main Garden put together.

All right, now that I've laid all my cards on the table, I'm going to tell a really gross story about bugs. This story may not be true. But it's disgusting, and it therefore has at least something in common with many true things, and anyway it's the true reason why I will never eat bugs, and that's what I'm supposed to be writing about.

There was once a baby born without a whole skull. Let's call him Timmy. Since part of Timmy's brain was exposed, he needed some very special protection, so the hospital assigned a male nurse to take care of him. The nurse quickly bonded with Timmy, despite the growing possibility of the boy's imminent death. Sadly, this nurse's head was as hard as Timmy's was soft. The two of them would play those cloying baby games together, only more gently so as not to spill Timmy's brain on the floor. Despite the odds, things were going pretty well for awhile. Then, tragedy struck.

The hospital staff found the nurse sitting on the floor of Timmy's room one cold morning. He was crying like a baby—he was crying for a baby. In his hand, he was holding a spoon caked with snot-colored glop. This same glop was strewn all over the walls. He was covered in blood. In the corner, they found little Timmy. His body was distended, as if someone had thrown him across the room in a rage. His little toes were black and blue; his little arms were twisted. And when they examined the hole in his head, what did they find? Thousands and thousands of... maggots. Maggots that had been feasting on his brain while he still lived—maggots that Timmy's nurse had tried in vain to scoop out with a spoon when he discovered them.

Now you might say, "Ian, when it comes to insects, it's eat or be eaten!" Well, Mr. Donner Party, I just hope you'll remember the story of little Timmy next time you're waiting for your iceberg lettuce. —Ian Blecher

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