Benefits abound for those with stomach for insects

By Gary Raham
Nature Writer and Illustrator

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Today, people often freak out when insects arrive at a picnic, but sometime --perhaps soon--such once--unwelcome guests may just be extra salad garnish.

Individuals like David Gracer, owner of Small Stock Food Strategies, encourage entomophagy (the fancy scientific term for eating insects) because of economic and ecological benefits. Scientists like Gene DeFoliart at www.food-insects.com also promote them for nutritional reasons. After all, they assert, bugs are a regular part of the human diet in over a hundred countries.

Gracer describes insects as a kind of "land shrimp," no ickier than crab or lobster, and provides insights into their preparation as food on both www.smallstockfoods.com and on his blog http://bugsfordinner.blobspot.com/.

To overcome the natural resistance to popping a grub in your mouth, benefits need to be substantial. Here are a few for consideration.

High nutritional value

Most insects can claim protein concentrations above 60 percent. House cricket protein beats soy protein for necessary amino acids. According to DeFoliart, insects tend to be high in lysine and threonine, amino acids that tend to be deficient in wheat, rice, cassava and maize-based diets prevalent in many parts of the world.

While insects vary considerably in fat content, those fats do tend to be the long-chained, unsaturated, heart-healthy variety. Insects all tend to score highly as vitamin and mineral sources. Just three crickets a day can fulfill a person's iron requirements. They are also high in zinc and calcium. The Angolan caterpillar, Usta Terpsichore, proved to be a rich source of iron, copper, zinc and vitamins B1 and B2. Termites rank high for magnesium and copper, and palm weevil larvae provide zinc, thiamin and riboflavin.

Lucrative business

In Japan, young grasshoppers boiled in soy sauce are sold as luxury items. Mitsuhashi, a Japanese author, thinks collecting young grasshoppers by school students and their parents "is an activity that adds poetic charm to rice paddies in autumn." Another Japanese treat, cooked wasps, provided a favorite meal for the late Emperor Hirohito, when mixed with cooked rice.

Raising insects (or other arthropods) as small cash crops, for example locusts in Thailand, can be a boon to many families in developing countries. Mexicans can cash in beetle grubs because of their popularity as an ingredient in tequila-flavored lollipops. Cambodians collect tarantulas, defang them, fry them in oil, and sell them as crunchy and nutritious roadside snacks.

It takes a lot less real estate to make a boarding house for breeding crickets than for raising cattle, pigs and other large vertebrates.

A 'green' industry

Those crickets discussed above prove to be about 20 times more efficient than beef in converting grass into food, according to DeFoliart.

As Gracer said, "Cows and pigs are the SUVs of the food world" (when it comes to metabolically burning grass). "And bugs-they're the Priuses, maybe even the bicycles."

Unlike pigs, for example, insects are mostly vegans. They eat a wide variety of plants, which may help explain why insects provide such a good mix of vitamins and minerals. One of the reasons the Spanish Conquistadores may have been surprised at the cleanliness of large towns in Mexico is that the Indians relied much more on insects and small mammals for food rather than pigs and cattle.

And entomophagy may be a great way to control certain pests. Don't spray 'em; eat 'em instead. It worked to good effect in Thailand 30 years ago when the government convinced its population that eating locusts was a good way to keep them from devastating crops. (The locust then wasn't on the list of 150 bugs the Thais preferred to eat.) Now, not a pest, some farmers plant corn to attract locusts, which they harvest and take to market.

Indians in the American west used to make good use of Mormon cricket outbreaks by herding them into deep, crescent-shaped ditches, adding some dried grass, and setting it on fire to create roasted treats.

A few drawbacks

Gracer calls insects "land shrimp," and they have some of the same drawbacks. People allergic to shellfish will probably also be allergic to insects in their diet because the chitin in their exoskeletons is nearly identical. And not all insects are edible. Some produce poisons of various sorts designed to discourage predators, or they pick up potentially dangerous plant chemicals. Monarch butterflies, for example, store glycosides from their milkweed food plants that would be bad for one's heart. Nevertheless, DeFoliart fills five pages on his web site with just some of the edible species used worldwide. He put together a series of display cases as a traveling exhibit for elementary schools in 1991.

Need a place to test out insect cuisine? As of last June, a New Orleans restaurant offers buggy dining as a spin off from the Audubon Nature Institute's Insectarium. Cornell University offers insect eating at their fall Insectapalooza. North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences has an autumn BugFest, and Purdue offers a spring Bug Bowl.

Besides, you've sampled bugs already. Even the FDA allows 60 insect fragments in six 100-gram chocolate samples and 30 fragments per 100 grams of peanut butter.

Bug Appetit!

Chocolate Chirpie Chip Cookies

Ingredients:
2 1/4 cups flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon salt
1 cup butter, softened
3/4 cup brown sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla
2 eggs
12 ounces chocolate chips
1 cup chopped nuts
1/2 cup dry-roasted crickets

Directions: Preheat oven to 375 degrees. In small bowl, combine flour, baking soda and salt; set aside. In large bowl, combine butter, sugar, brown sugar and vanilla; beat until creamy. Beat in eggs. Gradually add flour mixture and insects, mix well. Stir in chocolate chips. Drop by rounded measuring teaspoonfuls onto ungreased cookie sheet. Bake for 8 to 10 minutes.

Note: one source of insects is www.grubco.com. Crickets cost $15 for 500.