A Contest in Richmond

Yet more big news: I'm going head-to-head against the renowned David George Gordon. The email was so splendidly official that I am co-opting the text:

On August 1st I was invited to participate in the first annual Broad Appétit, a festival hosted by Richmond's Downtown Neighborhood Association. On Sunday, May 18, 2008, from noon until 5 p.m., West Broad Street will feature Richmond's finest chefs, a bug chef cook-off, specialty food vendors and visual artists. There will be food demonstrations and competitions, a mini-Farmers' Market, children's activities, street performers, music and more. The event will be heavily promoted through print material and advertisements in print and on the radio.

The slightly longer story is this: David George Gordon (whom I saw give his bug cooking presentation way back in 2002 here in Providence, and who, it must be admitted, has been a sort of model for my efforts) has competed against the redoubtable Zack Lemann in the past, and Zack was approached for this event so that the pair could duke it out once more. But AH!, Zack has a engagement set for that weekend that cannot be shifted. Thus the mind reaches for some replacement, so that the contest aspect of the thing can be realized. My name is broached, and deemed acceptable to all parties.

Naturally the news has thrown me into excited nervousness, and it's taken me a week of thinking about it to be ready to "blog it." I need to start planning. More updates on that progress to come.

Chapulines On The Menu!!

Wow. What a great way to start the month.

Today I dropped off a half-pound of the tiny chapulines at TWO popular restaurants here in Providence. I won't say which ones just yet, other than one of them is a Mexican place and one serves hipsters and artist-types. In a little while I'll ask them if I can include their names in this blog; what matters for the moment is that these adventurous people had taken samples from me and decided that it was time to play with a new ingredient.

In fact I'd made one or two previous small-scale sales before these, from that larger order I'd picked up last month. I know that there are other restaurants out there also willing to take the plunge, and I'll be selling frozen/chilled insects at a few of my up-coming events.

Thus the whole thing grows....

What Gourmet Insect Food Looks Like

In addition to getting the exotic bugs -- as I've mentioned several times by now -- the other main push this summer is to develop my cooking skills. I've mentioned elsewhere that people are often surprised that insects don't taste all that bad, and that that reaction is no longer satisfactory to me. Therefore it's time for me to finally develop my own cooking skills and make the insects shine.

And there are precedents models out there. Zack Lemann (last name is pronounced as 'Lemon,' by the way) is one of those few well-known insect chefs around. He's out of New Orleans and is currently orchestrating a venue at which regular insect-cooking demonstrations will be taking place. This is pretty amazing stuff. These are some of his culinary creations.


First is f-ANT-assticcrackers. The key ingredient is "Hormigas Culonas," the Leaf-Cutter Ant Queens. These were harvested in Colombia.


The Grasshopper Gumbo. These are lubber grasshoppers; they're quite large, and there's a big question about them.






Odonate Hors D'Ouerves. These are tempura-fried dragonflies on mushroom slices.




The Split Pea Whole Hopper Soup

Recently I was able to glean a few things from a chef at a party thrown by an Entomological Society. By and large this was a regular summer shindig: there were the traditional expected foods --



Grilled chicken; salmon; hamburgers and hot dogs. A token ear of corn.

And there was a variety of cooked insects:


One might say that these were "grilled," but in my slowly growing sense of clue regarding cooking I'd guess they were more steamed on the grill. While no liquid had been added, the convection from the coals never got through the foil, which means that no grilling was going on.

And how were these insects? Not so good. Too damp. The Giant Hissing Cockroaches were easily the worst, in fact they were inedible as a result of the whole 'juices trapped in the bug's body' reality. Really roasting them would likely be better, the more so after either ventilating the insect or even removing the gut.

The worst part was that the insects were basically wasted, because few people wanted to try them. I had quite a bit, but it looked hopeless.

Then in stepped Steven, who's a real chef. He was curious about insect cookery, and he showed me the best way to fry insects.

Here he is, keeping close watch over the crickets.




And a shot of the silkworm pupae that followed:




Worth noting: the netted-scoop-tool to the left of the pan is known as a 'spider.' That's amusing.

This was the first chance I've had to learn and prepare for the future. Making insects into haute cuisine makes me wish I had some real training.

A matter of taste

Something not addressed thus far in these posts: how do the insects taste?
One kind of answer deals with the details – dry-toasted cricket tastes like sunflower seeds; katydid like toasted avocado; palm grub like bacon soup with a chewy, sweet finish. Weaver ant pupae have practically no flavor, while the meat of the giant water bug is, astonishingly, like a salty, fruity, flowery Jolly Rancher. People are usually amazed by it.

The other kind of answer is more theoretical and conceptual: often, insects taste the way that people expect them to. After all, they’re absolutely outside the norm for us and it’s considered freakish to eat them. If insects were delicious then we’d all know it and we’d eat them, since we like delicious food. Whereas if insects are perceived [however incorrectly] as dirty, disgusting, disease-bearing vermin, the chances that they’ll be deemed delicious are pretty low.

Last March David Letterman had an exotic foods expert on the show; the occasion was a banquet at The Explorers Club. There was a long table set up with a slew of weird foods – giant hissing cockroaches were visible, but the short segment did not include that tasting. Letterman tried boiled ostrich egg, eyeballs, rattlesnake, and a bunch of other stuff. Both along the way and at the end he proclaimed them all horrible. Given that these foods were part of a lavish banquet given every year at a prestigious institution, the culinary preparations would not be in doubt. Rather, it’s likelier that Letterman (and, by extension, a lot of people) tried the food expecting it to be awful and this created its own outcome.

This is part of the challenge that I face. In my experience it’s not very often that those people who are willing to try an insect find it delicious. Three possible reasons for that occur to me: 1, that the insects are simply not good-tasting; 2, my cooking skills are not very good; or 3, the afore-mentioned culturally-based predilection toward the rejection of bugs as food.

On the other hand, the most frequent response I get from a taster at one of my events is, “Gee, that’s really not so bad.” This is actually encouraging, and part of me thinks that I should be quite satisfied with that reaction. I’m not. The goal must be to have people amazed at how truly tasty the insects are. I fault my cooking skills, or lack thereof, and I’ve resolved to partner with chefs so that I can bring my abilities to the next level, and do the insect ingredients justice, at last.

It's not super-stardom, but...

It's gratifying nonetheless. A charming young lady at that Newark event had written me up in her blog:

http://www.xanga.com/cral7616/596645762/bug-mania-2.html

Basics 3: Other resources [online]

It's been useful to remind myself that I'm not the only Westerner out there advocating for entomophagy. Brings to mind that John Lennon song: 'You may say that I'm a dreamer,' and so on. There are other voices shouting in the wilderness. Here's a listing of them; first entomophagy, then insect-related in general.

http://www.food-insects.com/
The ultimate source of information online regarding the edibility of insects. Includes: entomology; nutrition; general research; cultural aspects; societal reactions; etc, etc.

http://www.hollowtop.com/finl_html/finl.html
Further articles and content from The Food Insects Newsletter (FINL)

http://www.eatbug.com/
LOTS of good info, but no images. From what I've gathered, this is one of the earlier websites created. It was gone for a while, but it's back. Wrought by one Aletheia Price, who was 17 at the time. Includes recipes. I believe that a good deal of the same content can be found at
http://www.manataka.org/page160.html

http://www.davidgeorgegordon.com/
Hailing from the Seattle Area, David George Gordon is the most renowned entomophagist in the country. He's written a slew of books on various kinds of "bugs," including a cookbook; the site includes one or two of the recipes therewithin.

http://www.planetscott.com/babes/index.asp
Representing the good people at B.A.B.E.S., the Bay Area Bug Eating Society (which may or may not be currently active). The site's creator is Scott Bowers, who has traveled to various parts of the world in order to eat their insects. Includes recipes.

http://eat.bees.net/
Various images of people eating insects.

http://www.uky.edu/Agriculture/Entomology/ythfacts/bugfood/yf813.htm
From the University of Kentucky


Other insect recipes
http://www.ent.iastate.edu/misc/insectsasfood.html
http://www.ia.wvu.edu/~magazine/sum99/htmlfiles/cicada.html


Raising mealworms and crickets
http://www.icomm.ca/dragon/mealworm.htm
http://www.uky.edu/Agriculture/Entomology/entfacts/misc/ef002.htm
http://crawford.tardigrade.net/bugs/cricketsuppl.html
http://skylab.org/~chugga/cricket/index.html


[Highly Helpful] General Insect stuff:
http://www.bugguide.net/
http://www.whatsthatbug.com/
http://www.insects.org/

http://wiki.bidabug.org/index.php?title=Main_Page
This last one is a really cool project to gather a lot of information centered on the insect hobbyist, including a lot of good insect-rearing help.

A Colony Attacked

This might not seem a dramatic image. It was the site of a great catastrophe, at least from the perspective of the carpenter ant colony that lived there. I am what befell that colony.


I'd first turned over the log on impulse, and replaced it carefully when I found a seething mass of large, winged black ants. I returned the next day and a few times after that over the next four or five days. The ants were members of the genus Camponotus, a.k.a. carpenter ants. I've known for some time that people have eaten these ants here and there; supposedly lumberjacks in 19th Century Maine ate them to avoid scurvy.

I'd envisioned a "clean kill," meaning a labor-efficient harvest wherein I could harvest the insects only. It didn't work out that way, mostly because the ants had no interest in being harvested and therefore tried to run away very quickly. And it's true that that seething business rattled me; I knew that the ants couldn't hurt me, it was just that as I was scrambling to collect as many as I could, this is what I ended up with:



A whole lot of wood bits, dead leaves, and some soil, with a good deal of ant-made sawdust. It required a good deal of processing. I would've liked to document this process, but the sad truth about both this blog and much of my work in entomophagy is that I do a lot of it alone so there's no one to hold the camera.

I had about six or sevent containers from my various raids; some had this litter from the forest floor; in others it was mostly sawdust from inside the log. I found that sifting the mix in large bowls worked quite well, reminiscent of the old-fashioned wheat-from-chaff technique. All of this in order to get to the prize: the pupae.

Of course I'd collected a heck of a lot of ants too, and I was most interested in them also, despite my slight concerns about Wolbachia -- an endosymbiont that wouldn't do me much good if it was in my system. Here's the ants with a few bits of wood [toward the end of the sifting].

And here they are again -- the queen (one of many; methinks the colony, having done well for itself, was about to send a whole raft of winged alates into the the world); some drones; and the necessary workers.




I find the ants quite beautiful, dead or alive. And working on prepping them as food emphasized what I'd felt when I was collecting them at that log -- a touch of guilt.



I thought of the colony as a society or a machine consisting of living parts, each of which pursues its function for the greater good of the whole. This conception is on my mind quite a lot, and it's something that I'm pretty sure I wouldn't find in hunting magazines (if I read them, that is). A "real" hunter, as represented in such publications, respects his or her mission and goal; respects the quarry and the landscape too; honors the kill, but doesn't succumb to any feelings of guilt about having to kill. After all, hunting is simply the involvement of the meat-consumer in the process of getting the meat, and therefore the hunter is more authentic than someone who simply lets others do the killing, and merely picks up the wrapped and sanitized Styrofoam tray in the supermarket. There's a lot to be said about that perspective.

I appreciate the times when I feel this way, which I sometimes do. Other times, though, I have other feelings. When I was collecting cicadas off the trees in New Jersey in 2004 I thought a lot about the fact that these insects had been underground for 17 years, all in order to emerge and mate and die. All of that time in preparation for procreation -- arguably, the prime evolutionary function and purpose of every organism. And here I was, getting in the way of that. Granted, it's not much of a stretch to say that I was acting like any other predator. The mass emergence strategy of these multiple billions of cicadas was an evolutionary response to my actions as much as it was to the actions of birds, snakes, skunks, raccoons, bats, etc. The cicadas are a temporary banquet. "Go ahead," the vast numbers seem to say. "Eat all you want. We'll make more anyway. All of your efforts cannot make much of a dent in our overall numbers." How generous. Yet I remember the mixed feelings as I scooped up dozens of handfuls of live adult, newly-winged cicadas and the just-emerging nymphs into the large ziploc bags that went straight into the large icy cooler.

And so it was with these ants. A nation is attacked by something with greater technology. I don't really need to kill the ants, since I have lots of other foods that I could eat. But I'm trying to make a point here with entomophagy. It's just like other kinds of hunting, right?




Another kind of hunting these days has been for dragonflies (and the odd grasshopper along the way). It's the opposite of 'anting;' for one thing, it requires stalking and netting the individual insect, and so it would seem to be less labor-efficient. Given the way that I've executed this ant project, though, it's a toss-up.