Bug chef works to squash fears about eating insects

ISSAQUAH, Wash. -- Ladybugs are cute and butterflies pretty, but most people who come face-to-face with an insect have one thought: Squish it.

That is especially true when certain bugs -- gypsy moths in the Northeast, cicadas in the mid-Atlantic states, and tent caterpillars in the Pacific Northwest -- devour the landscape.

David George Gordon takes a different approach. He cooks bugs and eats them. He thinks insects are a valuable, underused, and delicious source of nutrition -- and he is determined to prove it one grilled grasshopper at a time.

"If you're eating hot dogs, you're eating stuff that's way weirder than a grasshopper," said Gordon, 54, a science writer and author of "The Eat-a-Bug Cookbook," before demonstrating the point to 400 children gathered at the Issaquah Valley Elementary School cafeteria in this Seattle suburb.

Wearing a green chef's hat decorated with two sparkly antennae, Gordon laid out his delicacies. He planned to serve tempura mealworms, orzo with cricket nymphs, grasshopper kebabs, and panfried hairy desert scorpions. (Scorpions are not insects, but they do look scary.)

Gordon plugged in a small electric wok, frying pan, grill, and deep fat fryer, and arranged his seasonings: salt, pepper, lemon, and a jumbo shaker of dried black ants from China.

The students were, by turns, riveted and disgusted whenever someone ate a bug.

There were plenty of "eeeewwwws" and wrinkled noses. School rules prevented the children from eating bugs, but staff members came forward to sample the goodies with a blank "mind over matter" look on their faces. On Gordon's instructions, the children shouted, "1-2-3! Eat it, eat it, eat it!" before each tasting.

Principal Sheryl Belt tried the cricket orzo and compared it favorably to Chinese food. She would not normally eat bugs but, she said, chuckling, "That's why they pay me the big bucks."

Bug-eating, or entomophagy, is uncommon in the United States, Europe, and Canada, but routine in many other countries. Canned silkworm pupae are a delicacy in South Korea, and some Japanese eat canned wasps. Locals eat grasshoppers in Mexico, giant water bugs in Indonesia, and termites in Africa.

Many insects are good-tasting as well as good for you, according to Gene DeFoliart, retired chairman of the entomology department at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. He compares their protein content to pork and beef, and says insects convert vegetation into animal protein much more efficiently than do cows or pigs. DeFoliart, whose own website, www.food-insects.com, celebrates entomophagy, adds that while cattle and pigs take months or years to get to market, a mother cricket can turn out 1,200 ready-to-eat larvae.

Often, a bug infestation provides an outstanding opportunity to cook insects on a large scale; some people in the Washington, D.C., area contacted Gordon for recipes during the recent invasion of cicadas.

But not all bugs taste good and some are downright dangerous to ingest, said Joseph Elkinton, a professor of entomology at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Many caterpillars have toxins in their spines that leave a bad taste in an eater's mouth.

That's why gypsy moth caterpillars and other voracious species can do a lot of damage, Elkinton said. Birds and other foes do not want to eat them.

Gordon, who lives in Port Townsend, Wash., became interested in eating bugs as he researched cockroaches and learned that they had long been used in medicinal teas and treatments. He tasted his first bug a decade ago, at a Seattle museum event where a Chex party mix was served with oven-baked crickets.