Why aren’t we eating bugs?
Cicadas are considered a gateway bug for people interested in testing out insect cuisine, which is attracting attention as a sustainable food source. (Photo Source: Emon Hassan for The New York Times)
With the rise of Brood X, cicadas are on our minds and, for some, on our plates. Bun Lai, the chef at Miya’s Sushi in New Haven, is hosting Cicada Dinners at his farm in Woodbridge, Connecticut, this summer, and has garnered the attention of The New York Times, among others.
“Eating Brood X has become so popular the FDA recently warned that people with shellfish allergies should not eat them.”
A long-time advocate of sustainable cuisine, Chef Lai created a popular “invasive species” menu at Miya’s, featuring a combination of local seafood and plants, like the Catfish Blues Roll, blue catfish fried in Old Bay Seasoning and beer tempura, or Muggu Mochi, frozen toasted mugwort mochi stuffed with sweet red beans. Given his interests, it makes sense he’s a proponent of entomophagy, otherwise known as eating insects.
“This is the healthiest taco you’ve ever eaten,” he says, handing me a crispy tortilla with a sprinkle of cheese, a bunch of wild sorrel, and smoked cicadas. He invited me to his farm so I could try insect cuisine myself. True to my American upbringing, I expect to be grossed out by the idea of eating bugs. But the way Chef Lai talks about it, as a delicious treat already eaten all over the world, makes it seem perfectly natural.
The wild sorrel, a “good weed” he picked from his garden as we talked, adds a fresh lemony flavor. The cicada is smoky and a little nutty. It falls apart in my mouth. The goal, he explains, is not to hide the insect under the other ingredients, but to highlight its texture and smoky flavor.
Black Soldier Fly larvae feeding on compost. (Photo Source: video still from Bun Lai’s Instagram.)
Next up is black soldier fly larvae pizza. He shows me to a screened structure with a trough full of compost and uses a stick to uncover a mass of squirming, milky-colored larvae feeding on decaying vegetables. Yum?
But Chef Lai has a bowl of spiced, dehydrated larvae ready, which he sprinkles onto a pizza along with a little cheese and mugwort, another invasive weed from the garden. When the pizza comes out of the oven, the larvae are light, crunchy, and vaguely nutty. They do not have much flavor on their own but add a nice texture to the wood-fired pizzas.
At Miya’s, they aim to use species that are “abundant, invasive and underutilized,” says Chef Lai. Black soldier flies are ideal because they reproduce rapidly and only feed off compost. “When you want to talk about sustainable insect-eating,” he says “it’s black soldier flies that really matter.”
“When you want to talk about sustainable insect-eating, it’s black soldier flies that really matter.”
Chef Lai, who promotes insect-eating in part because it’s more humane than our intensive livestock system, reasons that a creature with such a short life span doesn’t need to learn from pain and pleasure like a mammal.
“Adult black soldier flies don’t even have mouths,” he says, “they just grow up to procreate, and then they die.” He says that a grasshopper being eaten by a praying mantis will just keep chewing grass because being eaten is not actually painful to them. “Obviously, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t still respect them.”
The biggest challenge for me—my first real encounter with the ick factor—comes when Chef Lai tells me they sometimes eat the black soldier fly larvae fresh and still alive. To demonstrate, he sets out a bowl of squirming grub-like creatures feeding on a piece of rotting lime.
We rinse them in water, dip them in soy sauce, and pop them in our mouths. It explodes when I bite down on it but thankfully does not wriggle. Chef Lai describes the flavor as caviar or egg-like, but I primarily taste soy sauce. It isn’t bad, it isn’t particularly good, but it makes me realize something: it’s just not that gross once you overcome your fear.
Explaining the ick factor
Tasting insects is both an adventure, and a lesson in recognizing my cultural prejudices. Chef Lai explains that people eat insects in Asia, and have done so for centuries. Bugs have also long been considered a delicacy throughout history. Locusts were served at royal banquets in Nineveh in the eighth century BCE. Aristotle wrote about eating cicadas in Historia Animalium, and Pliny the Elder wrote that Roman aristocrats dined on beetle larvae. Today, insects supplement the diets of two billion people worldwide.
The author, Finley, tasting a live larva. (Photo Source: Bun Lai’s Instagram.)
And for good reason. Insects are delicious, nutritious, and abundant. In 2013, the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) published a report endorsing the inclusion of insects in a daily diet as a sustainable and nutritious alternative to other meat.
The average protein content of edible insects is higher than plant protein sources, and at the upper range—higher than that of meat and eggs. Though the nutritional value of insects varies widely between species, the FAO report found that, on average, they are an excellent source of micronutrients, amino acids, and B vitamins (among a long list of health benefits).
Eating insects is far more sustainable than relying on the resource-intensive factory-farming favored in this country—all over the world, forests are destroyed to make room for livestock. Cattle ranching accounts for about 80 percent of total deforestation in the Amazon region, and the release of 340 million tons of carbon to the atmosphere every year. Insects, not surprisingly, are highly efficient at converting biomass into protein, requiring far less land and water.
The FAO Report finds that mealworms are a more environmentally friendly source of animal protein than milk, chicken, pork and beef. (Source: FAO Report)
The problem is that, in countries with Westernized diets, bugs tend to gross us out. It may have something to do with our history of dominating other cultures in the quest to claim land. Julie Lesnik, professor of anthropology at Wayne State University in Michigan, who studies the evolution of insects as food, argues that the stigma around eating insects is largely rooted in colonialism.
During the so-called Little Ice Age (1200s-1800s), Europe was not an ideal climate for insects compared to warmer parts of the world. When Europeans, by then unaccustomed to eating bugs, colonized the Americas, they feared and scorned indigenous diets. Simultaneously, with the rise of agriculture, insects were seen as pests and relegated to an even lower status. Lesnik argues that these feelings of disgust were passed down from early European colonizers shocked by the practice of entomophagy, and wary of habits they deemed primitive and uncivilized.
Disgust, she claims, is a learned response: As children, we do not have an aversion to gross things. For instance, we are taught not to eat worms on the playground. She suggests that a little reeducation can help Americans unlearn intergenerational disgust.
Cicadas—a gateway bug
Cicadas may help us get there. Eating Brood X has become so popular the FDA recently warned people in a tweet that people with shellfish allergies should not eat them. In a 2019 report, the investment group Barclays, noted an expanding market around insect protein and predicted the edible bug industry could be worth $8 billion by 2030.
Livestock and pet feed used to dominate the market because insects are cheap and more sustainable than commonly-used soy meal, but demand appears to be shifting toward direct human consumption. In May, the European Food Safety Authority approved the sale of yellow mealworms in the EU, opening up the edible insect market in Europe. Last year, Meticulous Research, a market research group, projected the edible insect market will reach $4.63 billion by 2027, thanks to the growing awareness of growing greenhouse gas emissions from livestock and poultry, the high nutritional value of insects, low environmental impact over their entire life cycle, and low risk of transmitting zoonotic diseases.
Sautéed cicadas are on the menu in more households. (Photo Source: Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/Agence France-Presse)
Chef Lai would also argue it’s important to make them delicious. Grinding crickets and mealworms into flour has long been a popular way to incorporate insect protein into bars and baked goods. But with the arrival of cicadas, and innovative ways to prepare them introduced by chefs like Bun Lai, many more of us are embracing eating insects whole.
The problem with the craze around cicadas is that sensationalizing a particular species doesn’t lead to a sustainable practice. It’s why Chef Lai promotes eating a variety of invasive and abundant species—to create a more fundamental shift.
That said, I can now verify that cicadas are an excellent starting point for anyone interested in trying entomophagy. But step two doesn’t have to involve eating live larvae, given the wide variety of insects available. And unlike Brood X, these bugs are here to stay.
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