News

It's the kind of revelation that would have Howard Hughes turning in his grave: The average sleeper ingests four insects a night.

But Mary MacDonald, who offered up this surprising fact, has quite the opposite reaction.

"People have been eating insects for a very long time," says Ms. MacDonald, a naturalist who works with the Nova Scotia Museum of Natural History. "You're already eating bugs, and they're a great source of protein. So why not try them?"

It's not just an idle suggestion. The museum has been running a "bug bistro" cooking demonstration four times a week for the past two months, and they regularly get 40 or more interested people for each show.

The popularity reflects a newfound, if still far from mainstream, appreciation of bugs as food. An Internet search turns up instructions on how to raise insects for food.

There are also several cookbooks to choose from, with titles such as Creepy Crawly Cuisine.

And this summer, top chef Vikram Vij started including ground-up crickets in some dishes at his Vancouver restaurant.

The Halifax museum isn't attempting to scale those culinary heights. For the sake of simplicity, it sticks to sautéed mealworms, and after a short lecture everyone is offered the chance to try one. Amazingly, perhaps, to any parent who has tried to feed a child broccoli, the kids seem more keen than the adults.

"It tastes yummy," says four-year-old Maya Bowie, after chewing slowly and with great concentration. Her brother, two-year-old Noah, doesn't say anything as he goes back for thirds.

But Samantha Leroy, 9, pulls a face.

"It didn't really taste like anything, but it was crunchy," she says.

Most find the mealworms bland, but by no means offensive. One attendee compares them to unsalted popcorn and another says they taste like the dried-out fringes of a fried egg.

Veteran bug-eaters say it's time to put the squeamishness aside.

"All it is is a cultural taboo, and once they are eating this food they'll find it just like any other food," says Gene DeFoliart, a retired entomologist from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Mr. DeFoliart says he has eaten several types of insects, including an entire meal built around them, when he was a speaker at the New York Entomological Society.

(Now 83, he admits he doesn't dine on bugs much any more - his kitchen has become the place "where you mooch your first martini of the evening.")

He notes that insects were eaten in ancient times in the Middle East and the Mediterranean - notably by Pliny, Aristotle and John the Baptist - and that the practice persists in parts of Africa, southeast Asia and South America.

However, it may be losing its appeal in Africa even as it gains popularity in the West.

"I've been seeing some articles saying that indigenous peoples in sub-Saharan Africa are saying, 'They don't do this in the U.S. Maybe this is bush behaviour.' "

That would be "troubling," he said, because insects are a nutritional powerhouse.

"We found in our research that crickets were five to six times more efficient in providing nutrients than beef cattle," he said. "Each female cricket produces about 500 young crickets, so you can see how efficient that is."

When Mr. Vij added crickets to the menu at his restaurant, he did so without hype.

"It's just another part of the food chain," he explains.

"If you can eat prawns and you can eat lamb and you can eat mutton, I'm sure you can eat crickets as well. Prawns and lobster are pretty much the bugs of the oceans anyway."

Mr. Vij has been grinding the crickets up and using them in a parantha that he says has been well received by diners.

"I'm not here to force anyone," he stresses. "It's the same as a vegetarian who doesn't want to eat mutton."

***

Grow your own bugs

If you want to be the baddest

locavore on the block, try raising your own, um, herds of insects. It's cheaper than buying them from the pet store and there will be no chance of accidentally

eating the wrong kind of bug.

Mealworms

Build a home for them in a flat, plastic container. Fill it with a few centimetres of oats or other grain, put in a piece of root

vegetable and add purchased mealworm larvae. Put a lid on it and prepare to wait a few months, changing the vegetable occasionally.

Crickets

Start with an aquarium that has a firm lid. Line their new home with about five centimetres of potting soil, in which they will lay eggs, and give them several egg cartons to roost on. Feed them grain or vegetable scraps and mist the soil every few days. They'll be ready in a few months, provided they haven't escaped.

Source: Aletheia Price, eatbug.com