Much as foodies in New Jersey look forward to the first ramps of spring or the arrival of blueberries in midsummer, Thais enjoy predaceous diving beetles in June and a feast of mole crickets and water beetles in December. Come March, it’s open season on cicadas.
Just now emerging in the Garden State after a 17-year slumber, cicadas are a natural wonder to some and a noisy nuisance to others. But they are merely dinner in other parts of the world, as are nearly 2,000 other species of insects.
Earlier this month, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations issued a report that hailed insects — rich in protein and good fats and high in calcium, iron and zinc — as an untapped food source, although the authors stopped short of telling people to actually eat them: “Consumer disgust remains one of the largest barriers to the adoption of insects as viable sources of protein in many Western countries.”
Aside from the inherent gag reflex, what’s not to like? Not getting enough Omega-3s and fatty acids in your diet? Try mealworms, whose levels are comparable to fish. They also have similar levels of protein, vitamins and minerals. A species of termite found in Venezuela is a remarkable 64 percent protein; they can be fried, sun-dried or smoked, and in Uganda they are steamed in banana leaves.
Michelin-starred chef David Faure began serving insects -- mealworms with his cod, crickets with dessert -- at his Nice restaurant this year, inspired by his trips to countries where it's common to eat insects. "It's really a question of taste," he tells Bloomberg News.Eating insects would also be good for the environment — they emit a fraction of the climate-warming greenhouse gases as traditional protein sources, require far less land (the back of your neck will do quite nicely), and are extremely efficient at converting feed into protein. Crickets, for example, need 12 times less feed than cattle, and half as much feed as pigs and broiler chickens, to produce the same amount of protein.
And we haven’t even talked taste. You won’t find grasshoppers on the menu at Charrito’s, Hudson County’s mini-empire of Mexican restaurants, but the family that owns the restaurants hails from Oaxaca, where crunchy chapulines are a prized snack.
“They’re kind of like popcorn,” says Uzziel Arias, who manages the restaurants, opened by his parents, with his brother Ricardo. They’re toasted with garlic, topped with salt and lime and served with Oaxacan cheese and pickled jalapeños. They can also be mixed with chicken, pork or beef, stuffed into poblano peppers and pan-fried, and served with a ranchero sauce.
His customers have certainly become more adventurous in the 20 years since his parents opened the restaurants, but “Survivor” aside, he doesn’t think the American public is ready for crawly cuisine. “How many people are actually going to eat it?” he says. “Let’s be real.”
From Congolese dried caterpillars to Bangkok’s crispy fried locusts to Oaxaca’s toasted grasshoppers, insects are already part of the traditional diets of at least 2 billion people, mostly in sub-Saharan Africa and southeast Asia, according to the U.N. report.
But consumption is hardly ever reflected in official statistics, Alan Davidson writes in the “The Oxford Companion to Food,” in part because of the dearth of insect marketers to bring them within the scope of data of imports and exports, and “partly because the class of data compilers hardly overlaps at all with the class of insect eaters.”
The U.N. report finds that nearly 50 percent of the insects eaten are beetles (the European variety called the cockchafer was the basis of a soup considered a delicacy in France and Germany up until the mid-1900s) and caterpillars (witchetty grubs, the white larvae of the ghost moth, are traditionally eaten alive by Australia’s Aborigines).
But humans have made meals out of bees, wasps, ants, grasshoppers, locusts, crickets, termites and flies. One out of every 10 insects eaten is a cicada or one of its relatives.
Rutgers University entomologist George Hamilton says the Chinese grill cicadas on sticks over charcoal like shish kebab, and while visiting Bangkok, his guide told him that the female of the species is more delicious than the male because they need more fat to generate eggs. “I tried very hard to find a street vendor who sells them,” Hamilton says, “but I was never able to find them. I would have tried them.”
He has, after all, eaten caterpillars, crickets and chocolate-covered ants, and in graduate school, he and his fellow students would harvest corn earworm larvae from the tips of improperly sprayed sweet corn and fry them in oil. “They puff up like Cheetos and they taste like a bacon bit.”
Of course, almost everyone consumes insects, Hamilton says matter-of-factly, thanks to Food and Drug Administration regulations that permit a certain amount of “natural or unavoidable defects” in food production, including aphids (a relative of the cicada), fly eggs, and maggots — not to mention rodent hairs and “mammalian excreta.”
But let us not dwell on that.
Unlike other insects that are more difficult to capture — in Cameroon, women determine the most opportune time to harvest by putting their ears to palm trees to listen for the sound of the palm weevil larvae chewing through the trunk — cicadas should be fairly easy to harvest, Hamilton says. 1. Go where they are swarming. 2. Pick them off your flesh.
Evolutionary biologist Jenna Jadin compiled a cicada cookbook while doing her graduate work at the University of Maryland during the 2004 emergence there. She is quick to say that she would not characterize herself as someone who enjoys eating insects, but she quickly got into the spirit of public outreach, devising a Maryland-style cicada boil, sizzling soy-marinated cicadas in a stir-fry. sautéing them in butter with garlic (think cicada scampi) and dry-roasting them for banana bread.
“Dry-roasting them is my favorite way,” she says. “They just get a little more nutty.” When you cook them in liquid, they take on a “strange kind of asparagus quality,” perhaps from their diet of xylem, or plant sap. She also says the females make better eating: The males have partially hollow abdomens — that’s how they amplify their sound — so there’s just not a lot of meat to be had.
The best are newly hatched cicadas, called tenerals, because their shells have not hardened and there are no wings to contend with. Cicadas should be blanched soon after collection, and the hard parts and wings should be removed from the adults. “These parts will not harm you,” Jadin writes in the cookbook, “but they are also not very tasty.”
Cicadas with butter and garlic
— From Jenna Jadin’s “Cicada-licious: Cooking and Enjoying Periodical Cicadas” (University of Maryland, 2004) 4 servings
2 cups cicadas
1 tablespoon butter
2 cloves garlic, crushed
2 tablespoons finely chopped basil, or to taste
1. Remove wings and legs if using adult cicadas. Blanch in boiling water for 4 to 5 minutes to remove soil bacteria. Drain.
2. Melt butter in a saute pan over medium heat. Add garlic and saute for 30 seconds. Add basil and cicadas and continue cooking, turning down the heat if necessary, for five minutes, or until the cicadas begin to look crispy and the basil is wilted.
3. Serve with your favorite pasta and toss with olive oil, sprinkled with Parmesan if desired.