Bug eating in the Wall Street Journal

The Wall Street Journal gets on the bug-eating bandwagon with an article titled "The Six-Legged Meat of the Future." Edible insects are becoming trendy, with London's Archipelago restaurant topping their creme brulee with a bee and Manhattan's Tolache offering grasshopper-stuffed tacos. The image above is from the blog of Japanese bug sushi maker, Shoichi Uchiyama. The WSJ article includes sample recipes from "The Eat-a-Bug Cookbook" by David George Gordon:

Recipe: Crispy Crickets Preheat the oven to 225 degrees. Strip the antennae, limbs and wings (if any) from 20 to 30 clean, frozen adult crickets, or 40 to 60 cricket nymphs. Spread the stripped crickets on a lightly oiled baking sheet and place in oven. Bake until crickets are crisp, around 20 minutes. Yield: one cup.
Sprinkle these on salads or put them through a coffee grinder to turn them into bug "flour." You could even combine the crickets with Chex Mix for a protein-rich snack.

"The Six-Legged Meat of the Future" (WSJ, thanks Bob Pescovitz!)

Eat-a-bug Cookbook (Amazon)

David Pescovitz is Boing Boing's co-editor/managing partner. He's also a research director at Institute for the Future. On Instagram, he's @pesco.

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Crashproof

Nononononono. Kill it with fire, and then do NOT serve that as a meal. Gah.
The Mudshark

I tried both grasshoppers and scorpion from a street food vendor in Bangkok a few years ago. The grasshoppers were fine, crispy and felt quite a bit like potato chips.

The scorpion was a big black one, about 8 cm long, and it was pretty gross. Thick shell with gray gooey stuff inside. I had a pincer and threw the rest away. I guess some people would probably force it down for purported aphrodisiacal effects.
Rayonic

Sure I’d eat those bugs. After they’d been processed so hard not even a Homeopath would claim a relationship to their original form.
- Anonymous
  
  Feeding them to a chicken might be a good start.
Anonymous

Eating bugs is pica, a type of eating disorder.

The vast majority of the protein in insects is not digestible by humans. It’s even worse than eating sawdust because it actively interferes with digestion of fats. That’s the principle behind Chitosan.

Oh, anyone allergic to eating shellfish is also allergic to eating insects.

There’s also a long, long list of of parasites that insects can carry that are deadly to humans and hard to spot. The same is true with reptiles and amphibians.

Plants and algae are both much safer to eat and have a much higher net food value.
Metlin

To express the sentiments of someone I greatly admire, I think that this is unfortunate because the marginal novelty of the experience is outweighed by the fact this will contribute to an environment of demand where these insects will be killed off for consumption.

Buy a bag of fruit and nuts instead. Use the money that you save and take a trip to see these insects in the wild, learn about their volatile ecology, and celebrate your modest but contributory act of staving off a future where the only living things in the planet are man and the things that he eats.
- imag
  
  There is *no way* that the bugs served will be from the wild.
  
  They will, like restaurant snails, be carefully bred and fed on clean food. There are reasons not to like this, but endangering insects is hardly one.
  
  awjtawjt: Nice.
ill lich

“Waiter, I would like a Unicorn Chaser with this.”

“I’m sorry sir, we are fresh out of unicorn, might I suggest some griffin?”
dancentury

I ate some giant ants from Columbia last night. Smelled like honey, tasted like smokey bacon shavings. Not bad. I was waiting for lock jaw to kick in, or some allergic reaction, but it was all good.

Soylent Orange… it’s cicadas!
Anonymous

I think my leopard gecko is a big fan of the largish brown grubs displayed on the center of the plate (below the pinkish ones and above the black ones). If I’m not mistaken they are what is marketed in pet stores as “Superworms”: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zophobas_morio

Does anyone know what types of grubs are displayed on the plate?
I kind of get a kick out the image of my leopard gecko enjoying a “bug sushi” meal such as this one.
Mister44

If your land bugs aren’t your flavor, try some aquatic ones. Lobsters are giant bugs that live in water. Arthropods – bleh.
Anonymous

Leave them bugs alone!
Anonymous

Call me sarcastic but I’m all for the filthy rich eating bugs in fancy restaurants.
It makes me feel warm inside.
- Anonymous
  
  Once upon a time, lobsters were something poor folks ate. I don’t know how they made the transition to gourmet.
- Anonymous
  
  It makes me feel worm inside.
Coxswain

I know it’s 100% cultural, but this is one food trend I’ll happily be skipping. Bugs are gross!
MarkM

Chaser, please.

And, No, not some sort of insect smoothie chaser, thank you!
Art

No fun unless lock jaw sets in :)

Simply Scrump-Dee-Lee-Umptious!
racerx_is_alive

There’s some seriously broken links in this entry. The only ones that work are the amazon ones.
anatidaeling

In “Beetle McGrady Eats Bugs” by Megan McDonald (also author of the Judy Moody books and a former children’s librarian) second-grader Beetle McGrady eats an ant and learns all sorts of delicious bug recipes — included in the book.
Anonymous

I’d like to see the upper-eschelon readers of the Wall Street Journal eat some bugs, alright. And maybe some rats, as well. But preferably each other.
Aloisius

I’m genuinely confused when people will happily chow down on a prawn, but think eating a scorpion or a grasshopper is somehow icky.

Now worms, caterpillars and grubs? Meh. I think it is a texture thing.
- Anonymous
  
  quoting Aloisius
  > I’m genuinely confused when people will happily chow down on a
  > prawn, but think eating a scorpion or a grasshopper is somehow
  > icky. Now worms, caterpillars and grubs?
  > Meh. I think it is a texture thing.
  —-
  quoting Jonathan Badger
  > Meanwhile, most of the same people who find this repulsive eat
  > the “delicacies” of crabs and lobsters, which being fellow
  > arthropods, are basically the same thing.
  —-
  
  Aloisius, it’s more than a texture thing. Let’s change Jonathan’s comment a bit…
  
  meanwhile, most of the same people, who find eating cats and dogs as repulsive , eat cows and pigs, which being fellow mammals are basically the same thing.
  
  I agree, it’s a texture thing
Jake0748

To quote Jake when Elwood told him they had to go see the Penguin…

“No fucking way”.
Anonymous

People eat insects every day. Crab and lobster are in the arachnid family, along with spiders. Shrimp, and other seafood are the insects of the ocean.
Anonymous

OMG!!! Tarantulas aren’t bugs, they’re arachnids! OH MY GOD! Stop the insanity!!!!
Unmutual

I dont have anything against eating bugs, but stripping the wings and antennae off of 20-30 tiny crickets to yield a cup of roasted crickets? Sounds like an awful lot of work, I’ll stick with sunflower seeds, thanks.
- yosemite
  
  No muss no fuss with Oaxacan-style chapulines (grasshoppers): you don’t remove any of the appendages. Fry ‘em with chiles and lime for a delectable appetizer….
demidan

“Excuse me waiter, my meal just pooped on my plate and then bit me.”
Jonathan Badger

Meanwhile, most of the same people who find this repulsive eat the “delicacies” of crabs and lobsters, which being fellow arthropods, are basically the same thing.
- Unmutual
  
  To me this is less about “ew gross, bugs” as it is about “nobody in the developed world is really want for a cheap source of protein.”
  
  Seriously, soy beans are a complete source of amino acids. I’m not a vegetarian or anything, but I don’t exactly feel like I need to try eating bugs.
Anonymous

http://musikui.exblog.jp/ Here is his blog. I’m sorry but none of this can taste good. None. And I eat weird animal parts being Chinese but who wants this stuck in your teeth? I just imagine it like eating a bowl of peanut skins (not the shells, but the skins) or dry bacon bits that taste like dirt. Eating a cockroach must be eating canned dace where you can chew the fish bones till they break down. Gross.
Atvaark

I love the idea people can eat bugs, like the taste, get their load of proteins, be healthy, feel trendy, reduce their ecological footprint or whatever other advantages this has.

But the mere idea that *I* might put any of these in my mouth just makes me sick. Which is weird because I like crustaceans and they just look like big insects.

–

“Waiter, there’s not a single fly in my soup.
- Oh, sorry, Sir. I’ll go get you some.”
- Anonymous
  
  Well silly, just think of the bugs as really small crustaceans.
awjtawjt

Hakuna Matata.