In the search for sustainable foods, the U.S. may join the rest of the world in ordering a side of cicadas.

One morning this June, David Gracer started his day with a “cricket cookie,” a flatbread made of cricket flour and oatmeal. And for 30 days, he followed breakfasts like this with lunches and dinners of cicada Greek salads, termite cakes and cricket-filled shepherd’s pies.

The stunt—Gracer’s month-long diet consisting primarily of insects and no other meat—will be featured this fall on The Discovery Channel’s “Animal Planet” series. But for Gracer, an English professor in Rhode Island and long-time insect-ophile, this isn’t an elaborate dare: he is doing it to draw attention to insects as a viable and sustainable food source.

 

The Insect Alternative

Of the world’s 800,000 catalogued insects—millions more are unnamed—about 1,400 are commonly consumed in around 100 countries across Africa, Asia and the Americas. Many are high in protein and nutrients such as amino acids, riboflavin, niacin, zinc, iron and copper.

But in the United States, Canada and Europe, a scorpion on a platter is likely to ruin—not raise—appetites.

“There’s an incredible amount of bug bashing in our culture,” says David George Gordon, author of The Eat-a-Bug Cookbook and The Compleat Cockroach.

Gordon fingers overly enthusiastic exterminators and irrational germ phobia as the basis for the West’s squirmishness toward bugs. He also points out that insects are humanity’s only competition for food, noting that if a swarm of locusts can decimate a harvest, then eating that locust is “kind of like sleeping with the enemy.”

Nevertheless, entomophagy, or the consumption of insects, has gained some attention in the U.S. in recent years. With the rise of shock TV programs like “Fear Factor” and “Bizarre Foods with Andrew Zimmern,” and amid a global outcry over diminishing food resources and rising feed costs, a small community of advocates, including Gracer and Gordon, have seen their calendars fill with requests for public appearances.

“Weird cuisine is actually in now,” says Gordon, who has been holding events at libraries, nature centers and museums for about a decade. In the last few years, he has been surprised to find that about a third of his audiences now say they’ve eaten a bug.
In our interactive page, find out about six critters that are worth a tastBug cuisine aficionado David George Gordon fries up some insects in a cooking demonstration, captured on video by FLYP. Also, get the full recipes for the two special dishes he prepares.

 

Bug Advocates

Even if millions of Americans do suddenly decide to take up a bug diet, the supply resources aren’t in place domestically. While the pet food industries make crickets easily accessible to aficionados, only a handful of insect farms in the U.S. sell for human consumption.

So while the theoretical cost of insect farming and collecting is quite low, Gracer acknowledges that the price he currently pays for crickets is about what he would pay for the same amount of steak.

Now, he’s trying to change all that. Through his company, Sunrise Land Shrimp, Gracer has made it his mission to improve supply, distribution and demand for edible insects in the U.S. and abroad. He currently is in talks with one insect farm to produce cricket flour as a food ingredient and is in preliminary conversations with a liquor company, who he declines to name, about using insects as a flavoring agent.

In the short term, Gracer hopes to see a dozen or so mainstream restaurants put critters on their menus.

Find out what you never knew about bugs in our interactive graphic, from how many you are already eating to who should shy away from ingesting critters
Currently, edible insects can be found at a smattering of restaurants and in many of the country’s ethnic markets, mostly in urban areas.

Grasshoppers are on the menu at a few major Mexican restaurants specializing in cuisine indigenous to the Juahacan region (such as El Tule in San Jose, Calif.), while Vij’s, a world-renowned Indian restaurant in Vancouver, B.C., just added a cricket appetizer to their menu after consulting with Gordon.

In Providence, R.I., chefs at the Blue Elephant prepared food for Gracer during his recent 30-day insect diet and have plans to add bugs to their menu shortly. And in Santa Monica, Calif., insects-as-appetizers have been a staple at Typhoon for almost 15 years.

“Nobody runs away from a table,” says Typhoon owner Brian Vidor, who has offered such delicacies as Singapore-style scorpions, Thai-style white sea worms, Chambi ants and Taiwanese crickets. No cockroaches, though—Vidor says his clientele still isn’t ready for that.

According to Vidor, one problem with offering edible insects is finding a steady supply of ingredients. While his restaurant buys from a pair of stateside insect farms, everything else comes from overseas, primarily China and Thailand.

These unconventional imports frequently have led to shipping issues with the Transportation Security Administration and Department of Homeland Security, which is why Typhoon can’t offer as many species as Vidor would like. Nonetheless, he considers the challenges worth the effort, and not just because of his devotion to traditional Pan-Asian cuisine.

Insects “don’t go bad, and you can’t get salmonella from them. They look kind of weird, but it’s food,” Vidor says.

Not everyone agrees with Vidor’s assessment of the benefits of edible bugs.

Earlier this year at Toscanini’s, a gourmet ice cream outfit in Cambridge, Mass., owner Gus Rancatore collaborated with Gracer and freelance writer Sam Nejame to offer bug ice cream at a private function for anthropologists, writers and other interested parties.

Rancatore served chocolate covered grasshoppers in caramel ice cream and waterbugs in a strawberry lemon ice cream, because he thought it was an interesting idea and understood the role of insects in the diets of many immigrants.

Although Toscanini’s ice cream routinely trades in exotic flavors, like tomato, bacon and corn, the bugs didn’t make the public menu—even for a day. Nor did Rancatore taste the insects himself.

“I didn’t want to emphasize it to customers, because it would make them squeamish. They would see bugs when there weren’t any,” Rancatore recalls. “We’re looking for something with crossover appeal. I don’t think bug ice cream is going to break out.”

Nonetheless, bug advocates are keeping hope alive, and they’re looking to the example of sushi—unheard of 30 years ago and now commonplace.

“Lobsters were once considered fit only for pigs and convicts, and then they were discovered as haute cuisine,” says Gracer. “So there’s a precedent for the human palette to change.”

Watch FLYP’s Jessa Diaz as she tries to persuade people on the street to eat some of Hotlix’s insect treats, like scorpion lollipops. Mmm…