It started out innocently enough: My husband Tyrone and I were looking for a way to improve our four children's nutrition without going back to consuming beef, pork, and any more poultry than we presently do. Sending the children to public school with textured vegetable protein burgers and miso soup out to be more of an exercise in defending our lifestyle choices (to teachers and classmates alike) and was more than any kindergartner or first grader should be expected to take on. We now home school, but that's another story.
One day as I was selecting books for our shop, Sirius Books and Essence, I came across a review for one entitled Creepy Crawly Cuisine, the Gourmet Guide to Edible Insects by Julieta Ramos-Elorduy, Ph.D. Intrigued, I ordered the book. Part of our family mission - it has carried over into our shop's purpose - is to challenge our comfortable concepts, assumptions and biases. Ty and I saw incorporating bugs into our diet as an opportunity to exercise our open-mindedness. We'd seen enough National Geographic and Discovery Channel specials on other cultures to recognize that insects are a significant part of diets around the world... there must be something to it...
By the time Creepy Crawly Cuisine arrived, I had already taken the children on a field trip to the U of M's Entomology Department. We learned that the reason insects are so common in diets around the world is that they are extremely high in protein and nutrients, and provide an excellent source of unsaturated fat. Most insects can be consumed in all of their growth stages (egg, larva, pupa, and adult), and their complete biomass is usable. There is virtually no waste, as compared to fish, of which 40 percent is waste.
Cultural bias
Recently, a former co-worker of mine (a nurse practitioner) stopped by our shop. When she reviewed the nutritional values of insects compared with foods commonly consumed by North Americans, she had to admit she was impressed. If we could just get over our culture-based biases! David George Gordon, author of The Eat-A-Bug Cookbook, believes this bias, now nearly a social taboo, occurred primarily because early European settlers viewed insects as competition for their crops. Because they perceived the Native American's relationship with nature as barbaric, so was their choice to consume grasshoppers, ants and caterpillars. In contrast, it is widely reported that during locust "plagues" in regions of northern Africa, the locusts are collected and stored for later use, usually for important celebrations. It's all in how you choose to see things.
While the pictures in Creepy Crawly Cuisine show tasteful displays of mealworm spaghetti and mango-grasshopper chutney, trying to find stinkbugs for stinkbug pate', or a third of a pound of live leaf-footed bugs for pizza was next to impossible. We settled for two recipes that we found in Entertaining With Insects by Ronald Taylor and Barbara Carter. All we needed were mealworms and crickets.
Shopping challenge
The toughest part was trying to find a place to buy the bugs. I can't tell you how many times I prefaced my request with, "Don't hang up, I know this sounds weird, but do you carry edible insects?" Finally, we settled for the pet shop. The children and I walked into one of those large chain stores and picked out three containers of mealworms (25 worms to a cup) and 50 small crickets. We also got two clear plastic bug ranches so we could watch them instead of storing them in the fridge.
"What kind of pet are you going to fee these to?" the checkout clerk sweetly asked the children. They looked at me, and I handed her the recipes for oatmeal-mealworm cookies, and crickets & mushrooms over rice... "Well, honey is bee vomit!!" our 3 year old said indignantly, as the woman dropped the recipes and stepped away from us in horror. We had already prepared the children to expect that a lot of people would probably react in such a manner because this would be something new to them. We all decided that this would be our way of helping people expand their consciousness... in a very physical way.
We city dwellers rarely handle our food while it is still alive. Because the mealworms were packed in sawdust (this is no longer the case), we had to transfer them to our bug ranch which we had filled with oatmeal and a slice of potato. We let them alone for a few days to get the sawdust out of their systems. Actually, as another exercise in opening minds, we kept the bug ranches at our shop on the front counter next to the register. When asked what they were for, one of the children would pull Man Eating Bugs by Peter Menzel and Faith D'aluisio off the shelf, open to the beautiful pictures of insectivores around the world, and announce proudly, "This is our dinner".
Once you... swallow...the idea of what you're eating, they taste really good!. Insects are in the same family as lobster, shrimp and other shellfish. We dry roasted a few mealworms for our first try. They tasted like cashew-fed shrimp. I must say, the way my family downed the pot of crickets & mushrooms over rice brought a warm glow of pride to my heart.
Purchasing from the pet shop can get expensive, but we recently found a wonderful supplier called The Rainbow Mealworms Company, that will mail order to the public at great prices. I spoke to Cindy at Rainbow Mealworm and she was totally unfazed by my request. She says they have been providing edible insects for quite some time now.
Along with all of the cookbooks I've mentioned, our children have convinced us to start carrying 'Insect-Inside' lollipops (which have either a full grasshopper or scorpion in them) at the shop. They're certain it's the best way for the wary to get their first intentional taste of bugs: what the FDA allows in our food is yet another story.
Bon Appetit!!
copyright ©1999 Amy Cousin
read Meal Worms article here
Intentionally Insectivors, Consciously bug eaters
This article was originally published in the July 1999 edition of The Edge Magazine, Minneapolis, Minnesota.
Written by Amy Cousin
© Amy Cousin 1999
