I still remember a friend yelling at a meeting at our place after returning from Southeast Asia several years ago. He used to come with presents: fried worms of various kinds. I can’t remember seeing a party end so quickly.
For those party poppers—and others who can’t stand the idea of fried crickets (it’s delightfully crunchy, I must say)—I have just one suggestion. must read Extreme Eating: The Weird and Wonderful Foods That People Eat by Jerry Hopkins.
The foreword by the late chef, Anthony Bourdain, gives you an idea of what the book is about. He writes that before he left to film his food show, he consulted this “definitive collection” of unusual eats to see where he would eat. “Vietnam? That must be a little longer (half-term embryo duck egg). Singapore? Don’t miss the scorpions! After a few years of this, when offered spicy fry-ups of crickets or insects, I’m likely to say Is, ‘Bugs? It’s last week!'”
fly on the plate
The index gives you a glimpse into the book. It is listed in chapters as (among more such headings) Dogs and Cats; Horse; bison; water buffalo and yak; Mice and rats; hamsters, gerbils and guinea pigs; Bats and Elephants. Then there’s the bear; whale; Camel; Courage; Ears, eyes, nose, lungs, tongue, lips, gums, glands and feet.
I could go on, but you get the gist of it.
Jerry tells us the story of a 19th-century English gentleman named Francis Trevelyan Buckland. Raised by “eccentric and imaginative parents”, he, as a child, ate dogs, crocodiles and garden snails. “To a fellow graduate at Oxford she confessed that earwigs were ‘extremely bitter,’ although the worst-tasting thing was mole, until she ate a bluebottle fly.” Later, he writes, his London home served guests panthers, elephant trunk soup and roasted giraffes. “…and it was reliably reported that whenever an animal died at the London Zoo, the curator called Buckland home.”
Jerry writes that he has tried to make the book a guide to how and why the other half eats. That’s no Frank Buckland, he says, but he’s tried a wide variety of regional specialties—”from steamed water beetles, fried locusts and ants, to sparrows, bison, and crocodiles, the latter three being casseroles.” , grilled and served in a curry, respectively.”
global prospects
One man’s flesh may be another’s poison, but the point is, a wide variety of foods are eaten around the world, and for hundreds of communities, insects and the like are important sources of protein. I remind my seafood-loving but insect-hating friends that there are many more people who bite at insects than eat shrimp. As Jonathan Swift said, “He was a daredevil who swallowed an oyster first.”
Jerry explains that of the more than 800,000 insect species identified, thousands are part of the human diet. “Some of the more important groups include grasshoppers, beetle grubs and adults, ants and termites, insect and butterfly larvae and pupae, crickets and cicadas, bees and wasps, and flies…”
He adds that the people of Thailand treat “zeezy hot-pepper sauce” with ground-up water bugs, while in Cameroon, “a dish for special guests is palm grubs with salt, pepper and onions, Which is slowly cooked inside the coconut.”
Food habits change over time due to supply and demand (and environmental concerns). “Sometime in the future, the distaste for eating insects may change in developed countries,” he says. He cited a 1992 excerpt by Dr. Jean Defoliart, former editor of Edible Bugs Newsletterwhere he writes about the effects of insects gaining wide acceptance as a “respectable” food item in industrialized countries: there will be a new class of made-to-order for small-business and small-farm products with low inputs. and increasing the global trade of edible insects.
“And, by the way, guess which insect is most often mentioned as the protein source of the future?” Hopkins asks. “Get ready. It’s the cockroach.”
Rahul Verma loves to read and write about food as much as he loves to cook and eat. well almost