Cicadas on ice: how to prepare

There are several options for enjoying cicada snacks.

By Cameron W. Barr | The Associated Press

April 16, 2004

If you don't want to eat your cicadas right off the tree, place your bounty in the freezer, says David George Gordon, a science writer in Port Townsend, Wash., and the author of "The Eat-A-Bug Cookbook." "It's a dignified death; they drift off into a deep sleep and never feel any pain."

With your cicada supply on ice, the options unfold.

Native Americans dry roasted them using fire-heated rocks. John Zyla, an amateur naturalist in Ridge, in southern St. Mary's County, Md., suggests laying a few dozen on a cookie sheet and baking them in a 350-degree oven for five minutes.

Then serve with toothpicks and a selection of condiments for dipping, ranging from sweet to savory: chocolate sauce, honey, melted cheese, ketchup, mustard. Voila: cicada fondue.

The females, loaded with eggs, are more of a bite than the males, whose abdomens are largely hollow, in part because of the anatomical structures that allow them to make noise.

Some purists simply boil cicadas for a minute or two, in order to better appreciate their flavor. Other entomophages recommend stir-frying them; they will absorb the flavors of the rest of the dish. Some aficionados like their cicadas battered and deep-fried.

Grubco Inc., a Fairfield, Ohio, company that is one of the nation's leading suppliers of edible insects, reports that human consumption is rising. Company President Dale Cochran estimates that he sells 20,000 crickets, mealworms and wax worms every week to people who will eat the insects themselves or serve them to others. A decade ago, he sold a quarter as many bugs for human consumption. "It goes in cycles," he says. "The 'Fear Factor' show has kind of increased demand, and at Halloween time we get quite a few people ordering them."

"The overall idea of eating insects is probably more widely accepted than it was 20 years ago in the U.S.," adds Tom Turpin, professor of entomology at Purdue University and founder of The Bug Bowl, an annual festival focused on insects that begins today in West Lafayette, Ind.

More than 30,000 people were expected to attend this year's two-day event, three times the number who showed up five years ago. Thousands of Bug Bowl-goers consume a stir-fried mealworm or a chocolate-dipped grasshopper.

Still, persuading people to eat a bug isn't easy. "We've all grown up to think of insects as basically the enemy," says Michael Schauff, a research entomologist at the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Not so in Asia, where Thais munch on fried grasshoppers and Japanese eat the rice grasshopper known as hashi, a practice that curbs the need to use pesticides in the paddies. Africans adore locusts and many varieties of caterpillars. Many people in Central and South America consume ants, grasshoppers, stink beetles, and, well, the list is long.

Bug-eating enthusiasts suggest that Americans should include a few more insects in their diet. At a time when the safety of many sources of protein -- from beef to salmon -- is being called into question, insects offer an alternative. Shrimp and lobsters, part of the same biological phylum that includes bugs, are essentially sea insects. No one thinks twice about spreading toast with honey, known among wise-cracking entomologists as "bee vomit."