Enjoy.

Wanted to share this with you.

The current issue of The New Yorker features a great article by Dana Goodyear, entitled “Grub.”  Ms. Goodyear attended our symposium at the annual ESA Conference in San Diego last December, and then joined some of us for a high-profile insect-chef cook-off last May at the 25th Annual Bug Fair sponsored by and held at The Los Angeles Museum of Natural History.  Here’s her article: grub

It’s already generated a good deal of attention; I did a radio interview on Friday, which I’ll post in the next few days.  I was actually articulate.   In the bigger picture, there has been a huge increase in the amount of press coverage for this subject.  At some point I’ll include a run-down of all that.

Tyra Banks Show: Recorded Jan 21, 2009, WWOR: Teaser at 1:10; Interview at 4:50.

I remain very active in the world of entomophagy and advocacy around the subject of insects as food.  I really need to get back to posting.  I know I’ve said that before.

Stay tuned.

The new name may have some of the same attributes, but to a far lesser degree. It’s time to move into insect farming/rearing/husbandry — these words are interchangeable. While some of the exotic “bugs” I’ve gotten over the years are quite tasty and impressive, ‘the movement’ will make the most progress through the production of captive-raised insects.

The wonderful Keri & Justin are my new webmasters, and I’m thrilled with what they’ve done. Those seeking Sunrise Land Shrimp will now be routed here. Welcome to my home.

I’ve put two San Franciscans in touch with each other, and they might be working together later this year. 

I know of several folks in Nebraska, in Texas, and in several other parts of our country and the rest of the world, who could and perhaps will be making progress on plans together.

Creating community is what it’s all about.  Each person curious to do more with entomophagy will be able to do more with company around.  Each person is not the only one out there.  Speaking as someone who felt kind of lonely feeling this way, I know that it’s a powerful thing to create community. 

This is a major part of my new mission.

By Deborah Allard Herald News Staff Reporter, Posted Mar 26, 2009 @ 10:33 AM,

Fall River —The American palette has become wild and complicated, maybe due to the limitless variety of foods available, the exotic appetite of a continually changing immigrant population, or the television shows that tout interesting ingredients.

Whatever the reason, it seems people really will eat anything. From crickets to kangaroo meat, it’s on America’s menu.

“You can mix crickets into a stir fry. They’re used as a replacement for shrimp or chicken,” said David Gracer, a Providence man who believes more people should consume insects as a way to healthy eating and because it can sustain the earth’s resources.

Bugs, he said, take a lot less food, water and space to farm, and they’re high in protein, vitamins and minerals, and low in fat. And, after all, they’re not gross, they’re the “land cousins of the crustaceans,” Gracer said.

Unfortunately for Gracer — who’s appeared on “The Colbert Report” and been featured in The New York Times Magazine — there isn’t much of an insect food production market in the United States. His mainstays are crickets, meal worms, also known as beetle grubs, and wax worms when they’re available.

“Most weeks I eat insects,” Gracer said. “I would eat wax worms every day if I could get them.”

Crickets are the most easy to come by and are generally purchased frozen or dried in specialty markets and online.
“They tend to taste nutty like sunflower seeds,” Gracer said.

For people who don’t want to eat the bugs’ legs or wings, Gracer said to put dried crickets in a paper bag and “shake violently.”

How many crickets should a person eat as a meal replacement for shrimp or meat? Gracer said to consume about 100 grams, roughly a soup bowl full.

If you think you can’t get crickets locally, think again. The Oriental Food Market at 418 Quequechan St., in Angkor Plaza, Fall River, sells frozen crickets.

“You just fry it with salt,” said store owner Sandy Srey.

For those with exotic appetites, the Oriental Food Market also has a variety of different Asian fishes, frozen squid head, snake fish head, snail meat, and farm raised frog legs.

For cooked frog legs, Moulin Rouge, a French restaurant in Tiverton, has the delicacy on its regular menu. The Mu Que C Restaurant in Cambridge also offers fried frog legs, along with tripe stew and fried yucca root with dried beef. For the truly “crazy” eater, The Wine Cellar in Boston has a dish called “The Crazy French.” It’s a plated mix of marinated kangaroo, ostrich fillet and rabbit loin with oil and potatoes.

To some, octopus might seem a strange thing to eat, but to Fall River’s Portuguese population, it’s a tasty part of the diet. Chaves Market on Columbia Street has a freezer full of octopus, generally used to make a dark stew. They also sell Canadian quail and rabbit.

The emu is getting to be a popular poultry item, though it is actually considered a red meat.
“We sell out of our own meat, 600 to 1,000 pounds each year, within four or five months,” said Dee Dee Mares, owner of Songline Emu Farm (www.allaboutemu.com) in Gill, a town in western Massachusetts.

Each bird produces about 25 pounds of meat. “It’s delicious in flavor,” Mares said. “The American Heart Association has declared it a heart healthy red meat alternative because of the lean quality to the meat.”

Even in the regular supermarkets, food is becoming more adventurous. It’s not hard to find tripe, buffalo meat or tongue at Stop & Shop and Shaw’s locations.

At the Price Rite on Pleasant Street, Fall River, is a selection of pork tails and skins ready for culinary inspiration.
For Gracer, “a regular guy who eats bugs,” it was a gift of edible meal worms in 2000 that triggered his curiosity in bug consumption.

“I strongly believe in the future of insects,” Gracer said.

To learn more about Gracer’s movement to farm insects for human consumption, visit www.slshrimp.com. Chefs are welcome.

original article HERE

Giant Water Bugs [Lethocerus indicus, which for some reason I've barely mentioned in this blog]. I call them ‘usual’ because they’re one of the insects more-or-less easily available in Asian markets in Providence. Though I’ve seen them served whole-fried in Thailand (I found myself unable to masticate them much at all, I guess my mouth is too tender), I serve them filleted; taking out the muscle tissue in the thorax. Most people are pretty blown away by the taste of it, but some folks just purely hate it.

And the unusual:
Thorny Stick Insects [Eurycantha horridum], which unfortunately are not all that good after all. Not much to eat on them, but they’re much appreciated and enjoyed in Papua New Guinea, where they’re stuck on a stick and roasted over the fire.

And there was one item that I myself had never tried: house fly pupae.

I’d gotten them last fall, through the kindness of folks at Cornell’s Ag department — thanks again, Allie!! I can admit now that I had a bit of a hang up about trying them, which had surprised and disappointed me. After all, I was supposed to be beyond having such issues. The problem I had was that when I picked them up in the insectary, I smelled what they’d been eating — a mixture of milk and really rich calf feed, I think — and saw the dried bits of that mixture among the pupae; I didn’t enjoy the prospect of separating them.

Between the smell and the prospect of having to sort through the pupae themselves [the tiny red pills] and fish out the bits of their food [the vague nuggets], I wasn’t eager. But at last I realized the simple solution there in front of me all along. If I would just parboil the pupae, as I did the crickets as part of their processing, the nuggets would melt away; such smell as there might be would dissipate as well; and then I could pan-fry the pupae and serve.

And it worked fine! Unfortunately I was too distracted to get an image of the final result, so once again my patient readers will have to take my word for it — until such time, at least, as they can sample such cuisine for themselves. The pupae have a little bit of crunch from the very thin shells. The flavor is rich with a hint of iron, sort of like blood pudding. All other things being equal (meaning, if the idea of it wasn’t particularly disgusting to so many people) I think there could be great potential for mass-rearing them and processing the pupae into either a flour or “hamburger helper” kind of protein ingredient.

I’m very happy to have gotten over my hang-up about this food. As always, I’m not describing all of this to gross anyone out. It’s a food like any other, it wasn’t raised on dead meat or on the side of the road, and therefore it’s just like any other kind of entomophagy: a matter of triumphing over that bad ol’ cultural conditioning.

The broad landscape of DeFoliart’s magnum opus is full of little gems. This is one of my favorites; though a bit long, I’m including the whole thing for sake of thoroughness:

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L.O. Howard (1915), lamenting that there has been very little work recently on the edibility of insects, reports results obtained at his suggestion by J.J. Davis and D.G. Tower at Lafayette, Indiana, on the eggs and larvae of Lachnosterna:

They find that Lachnosterna eggs crisply fried in butter are excellent, having a taste very much like a fine grade of bacon. The larvae, fried in butter and eaten with bread in the form of a sandwich, were not at all disagreeable, having a fresh fatty taste. They ate the heads and all, and the heads were crisp and caused no inconvenience. This line of experimentation seems to me very well worthwhile, and field agents having the opportunity and disposition are urged to experiment in this direction when it can be done easily and without loss of time.

Howard’s last statement suggests that he was acutely aware of how taxpayers would view such research by a government agency.

Howard (1916) suggests that, with many nations facing food shortages because of war conditions, it is a propitious time to consider new and cheap food supplies. He notes that although there is an extensive literature on the historical use of insects as food, there has been little modern experimental work:

These facts point out the desirability of just such experiments, and practically all our colleges of agriculture, with their departments of home economics and of entomology, are in excellent position to do just this work. First, the edibility of the principal species abundant enough to furnish a good supply must be tested, and when the edibility of any one or more of them has been established, careful scientific work on their relative food value must be carried out. Two kinds of insects from the viewpoint of abundance and possible food value at once suggest themselves, namely, grasshoppers and the larvae of Lachnosterna in this country and of Melolontha in Europe – ­the so-called ‘white grubs.’

Howard describes a salad and a broth prepared by Dr. C.F. Langworthy, Chief of the Office of Home Economics, USDA, from Lachnosterna larvae shipped from Madison, Wisconsin, by Mr. J.J. Davis and Professor J.G. Sanders. Howard describes the informal taste panel that was assembled:

The salad was eaten by Messrs. C.H. Popenoe, W.B. Wood, F.H. Chittenden, E.B. O’Leary, R.C. Althouse, W.R. Walton, C.E. Wolfe, and Herbert S. Barber of the Bureau of Entomology and Vernon Bailey of the Bureau of Biological Survey, as well as the writer. It was found very palatable, although in chewing, all of us discarded the tough chitinous skin. Dr. Chittenden discovered a disagreeable taste which none of the rest of us noticed. He tried only one, and possibly that one may have been a little spoiled. The broth was drunk by Mr. O’Leary and the writer, and we both agreed that it was not only perfectly unobjectionable but really appetizing.

Shortly afterward, Mr. Davis collected a sample of Lachnosterna grubs in Lafayette, Indiana, more than 100 of which were sent to Washington, and the remainder of which were made into a stew (described by Howard) which Davis and his colleagues, Messrs. Fenton and Mason, pronounced as delicious:

They prepared the grubs as they thought oyster stew was prepared, and of course ate the grubs as well as the broth. Mr. Mason thought it tasted very much like boiled crab meat and not much different from lobster. Mr. Fenton thought that it tasted much like lobster, but had not eaten crab and so was not in a position to judge whether they were more like the latter. Mr. Davis had never eaten either fresh crab or lobster, but thought that they had a decided seafood taste. All thought it ‘agreeable’ and ‘were sorry when it was all gone.’

From the grubs sent to Washington, a stew (described by Howard) was made in Dr. Langworthy’s laboratory which was found to be “very appetising.” It was eaten by Messrs. E.B. O’Leary, C.E. Wolfe, C.H. Popenoe, Joseph Jacobs, A.B. Duckett, C.H.T. Townsend, C.S. Menaugh, W.R. Walton, W.B. Wood, and by Howard. Howard states that analyses and digestibility experiments were planned to determine their food value (Lachnosterna is now considered a synonym of the genus Phyllophaga). In concluding, Howard states that he is “sure that the prejudice against insects as food is perfectly unreasonable.” In a footnote to this article, Howard mentions that, “Miss Colcord, the Librarian of the Bureau of Entomology of the United States Department of Agriculture, is preparing a complete bibliography of this subject [insects as food] for publication in the near future.” So far as known, however, the bibliography was never published.

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This is a story in which people created an object lesson that achieved its goal. Though it didn’t effect policy or funding priorities anything like that, insects were served to well-to-do Americans, under no false pretences whatsoever, and were deemed quite tasty. I would absolutely love to re-enact this story, but there’s so much I don’t know.

What method was used to harvest the beetle grubs? How much did they harvest, and how much labor did it require to get them? What cleaning process was used [not merely to wash the dirt off them, but to clean them out]? What made them decide to serve them in this fashion, and to these people? Did it lead to any similar experiments?

I’ve tried (though perhaps not with sufficient perspicacity) to find historians in the Department of Agriculture, the University of Wisconsin, and Purdue University – where, I suspect, the gentlemen had originated. I’d hoped that those archival representatives might find one or two useful accounts of what had happened.

I have no particular ambitions to raise June Beetles (Phyllophaga) for consumption. There are many other candidates I’d try first that would be more economical. Even so, it would be fun to collaborate with a chef for a few recipes…