—Originally published Jan. 2015.—
Last November, I was invited to an annual tater-and-meat fry at a campsite an hour west of Lafayette. My contribution — breaded catfish.
I didn't have any batter on hand, but I was in luck. My roommate told me that Lauren Sedam, who used to have my room (and my job), had left a bag of enriched white flour in our kitchen cupboard. The bag had been opened, then taped shut. It seemed fine to me, so, without a moment's hesitation, I dumped it all into a metal pan filled with garlic salt and pepper.
Powder mushroomed into the air. The flour settled. I had to dust off my glasses before I saw it — them. The flour was … alive. Thriving. Squirming, in fact. Squirming with maggots.
Seeing the first light of day, hundreds of worms tossed and turned like puppies in snow. They were burrowing in and out of the flour, leaving tiny craters in their wake.
My best guess was that they were flour moths, or Indian meal moths, a common species with white, elongated, bulbous bodies and brown heads. They're known to love dark places, such as cupboards filled with cereal or grain. Females can lay up to 300 eggs at a time.
If this is grossing you out, just consider what I did next. At first, the scene made me wince, sure. But then it got me thinking about the most misunderstood and underutilized alternative food source in the world. I got my chopsticks. I nabbed a particularly juicy maggot and turned it over like a slice of steak, thinking, "Protein."
That's right. Bugs don't ruin food. They are food.
If I hadn't been cooking for a whole bunch of potential non-entomophagists — aka totally lame people not into eating bugs — I would have thrown the maggots right into the batter, giving the catfish a boost in nutrients. (A caveat: You might not want to actually do it in this case, as you'd risk including carcasses and waste. Insects should always be eaten fresh, cleaned and cooked.)
I'm far from the only person in the world who'd do the same thing. In fact, the majority of cultures in the world eat bugs. In a 2013 report on global food shortages, the United Nations identified insects as an important potential solution to world hunger and sustainable food production.
"Common prejudice against eating insects is not justified from a nutritional point of view," said the U.N. authors. "Insects are not inferior to other protein sources such as fish, chicken and beef."
They're right. Bugs are like any other kind of meat, albeit leaner and less flavorful. Sure, there's always risk in consuming any protein — just think of mad cow disease and the various pig and chicken viruses out there — but as long as you pay attention to sourcing and cook thoroughly, the practice of eating bugs is safe.
Chances are the flour you use already has tiny bits of weevils or maggots in it, and that's totally OK. The Food and Drug Administration allowsup to 75 or more insect fragments per 50 grams of flour.
Experts say many foods could potentially have some component of insects — harmless critters that get caught in the food-making process.
If more of us ate crickets, mealworms, cicadas and larvae, there'd be fewer hungry people in the world and we'd lessen our impact on climate change as a species. That's because birds and mammals are endothermic, so they eat and poop a lot more than bugs. Crickets, on the other hand, are exothermic, so they require less energy and emit drastically less methane per pound of protein.
Cricket flour, a product made from ground-up crickets, is among the most promising food trends of 2015. It's low in fat, high in protein and, without those black buggy eyes and antennae, bypasses the gross factor. Chocolate and peanut butter-flavored cricket bars are on the rise as a healthy and eco-friendly energy snack. The rise in popularity of the "Grass Whopper," a burger using cricket meat, means cricket farms (which take up less space than cattle ranches, leaving forests intact) could be a big part of the future of food.
You can bake, stir-fry or boil bugs. Many are neutral in flavor, so season with salt or cover with honey or chocolate and serve to adventurous dinner party guests. Cookbooks range from "The Insect Cookbook: Food for a Sustainable Planet" to "The Eat-a-Bug Cookbook" and blogs like "Girl Meets Bug."
Why grubs are grub
I grew up mostly in the U.S., so I understand bug-phobia. I hate, hate, hate co*ckroaches. I shiver at the thought of fuzzy caterpillars. I'd touch a tarantula with a 10-foot pole but stop there. But you could say I'm the same way with most kinds of animals. Chickens terrify me, pigs disgust me and cows smell, not to mention they have zero personality.
The first time I came into close contact with a cow was last summer, at Fair Oaks Farms, one of the country's largest dairy producers. Fair Oaks is known as an industry leader in sustainability and cleanliness because it found a way to convert manure into fuel. Instead of stinking up barns and releasing methane into the atmosphere, manure is vacuumed directly into a biogas converter, creating a potentially endless supply of fuel for the farm's tractors.
Yet in many ways Fair Oaks still is a sad sight. That's not a dig at Fair Oaks — after all, it's one of the few big farms to open up its barns to the public — but a visceral reaction to common practices in Big Ag.
I saw hundreds of cows locked in a giant wheel, their udders weighed down by metallic pumps that buzzed and hummed 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. The pig pens were so crowded that, at one point in time, thousands of piglets were being crushed by their mothers when they laid down to provide milk, Fair Oaks' CEO, Gary Corbett, told me. The farm had to develop a system to soften the landing, the reason being that the financial cost was too great.
Of course, I was back to bacon burgers the next week. I think, as an American, this is built into my food habit DNA. I'm conscious and educated, so I'm disgusted by what I know of the conditions inside slaughterhouses — but not enough to swear off meat. We call them deeply ingrained habits for a reason.
I took up eating bugs precisely because I'm so good at abstracting where my food comes from. Tell me pigs roll in feces and I'll still love a thick slice of bacon. Tell me mealworms — which really just look like chow mein bits once they're fried up with some soy sauce — are icky because they come from the ground and I'll just close my eyes and imagine it's takeout.
I'm not sure why Americans, or perhaps Western eaters in general, are so much better at overlooking the guilt factor than the yuck factor for their food. Then again, ever since I moved back to the states at the age of 10, I've always had trouble calibrating myself with American notions of weirdness.
There's the obvious stuff I don't get, like wearing shoes indoors, but the list of accepted and not accepted habits goes on — why was it odd for me to need to wash my hands before every meal or rinse my mouth after, when it wasn't odd to bite your nail or crack your knuckles? Growing up, I was unnerved whenever someone called me weird when I wasn't, or when someone acted totally weird and no one cared at all.
I also felt offended when my friends assumed I was fine with behavior that really should be unacceptable no matter where you're from, like eating dogs. I don't know anyone in Taiwan who eats dogs, but even if I did, why on earth would I be OK with that? I'm not sure if people asking me that question wanted to accept me for my exoticism or feel disgusted by my weird foreign practices. After all, culture, especially food culture, is like a moving needle on an erratic metronome.
Sometimes, what is and isn't OK to eat seems so arbitrary — and even when it's not, even when the reason to say no is moral or emotional, we're afraid to say anything that might belittle another culture. Two billion people eat nearly 2,000 species of bugs, in pretty much all continents except Europe. Is it time to stop treating entomaphagy with disdain?
Most Americans find bugs disgusting. They know, however, that they make great television. The two most popular shows that have featured insect eating are "Fear Factor," which uses bugs to test its contestants' humanity, and "Bizarre Foods," which views entomaphagy, like it does all foreign foods, through a thick lens of exoticism.
Entomaphagy's most telling television appearance, however, came in 2012 on the reality show "Shark Tank," in which bug eaters tried to legitimize, not exoticize, the practice. Startup company Chapul pitched the idea of cricket flour energy bars to investors. Businessman Mark Cuban was so impressed by the entrepreneurs' revolutionary snack he took them up as a partner. Now two more companies, All Things Bugs and the upscale chic Exo, also are betting that Americans will warm up to eating crickets.
These cricket bars aren't very exotic, nor are they uncivilized. On the contrary: All three brands remind me of a certain West Coast urbanite who wants to eat something nutritious, easy and sustainable — even trendy. Exo looks like an even fancier version of Clif bars. Chapul has similar branding to Teavana, and its website even has a Chipotle-esque mission section, with simple graphics on how insects have 15 percent more iron than spinach, two times more protein than beef and as much vitamin B12 as salmon.
Sympathy for the weevil
People still are asking if this is the future, but the answer seems obvious, if a little hard to swallow. People care more and more about what their food does to their bodies and their planet. They're looking for alternatives, although they know it's easier to embrace something when it falls in their lap than when they have to forage for it. This may take some time yet.
So it was with a heavy heart that I poured the maggot-rich flour into a Ziplock bag. No more insect crunch, with that slight nutty finish, tossed on high-heat in a garlic, onion, red pepper and butter stir-fry, as I've done with mealworms. When I threw the bag into the trash, I even thought for a moment that that was the only place a bag of maggots belonged. Even bug lovers could understand. We are Americans after all, so we're a little behind.
After years of socially conditioned insect-phobia, enjoying bugs as food takes courage and conviction. But it's something I'm very, very slowly — at a caterpillar's crawl, you might say — learning to love.
