 If You Like Crawdad Jambalaya, Why Not Cricket Jambalaya?
Montana State University students got a real taste of their work recently. Students in Florence Dunkel's "Insects and Society" class at MSU-Bozeman baked, fried and sauteed the subjects of their class into concoctions which they then ate and offered to visitors. The annual event is known on campus as the "Hopper Fry." "There are very few places in the world where eating insects would be news," says Dunkel, one of the editors of "The Food Insects Newsletter." Except for Western Europe and North America, insects are eaten regularly in other countries and provide a major source of protein. Grasshoppers, for instance, have about three times the protein of a sirloin steak, ounce for ounce. Food preferences are culturally derived. Otherwise, how could one explain why many Americans prefer bee regurgitation (honey) to any other sweetener, while cringing at a Cajun-spiced stir-fry that just happened to use crickets as an ingredient? The cultural aversions can be overcome, as evidenced by one student who pocketed three of what Dunkel calls "chirpy chocolate cookies" as he left the room, seeming to find the little brown dry roasted crickets in them as tasty as chocolate chips. Attitudes toward insects as food are important, says Dunkel. There examples of people stopping insect infestations by harvesting and eating the insects, and the nutritional benefits of insects are difficult to replace in many areas of the world. In some countries that are becoming westernized, they may mimic U.S. preferences and leave behind insect-eating, but have no other protein source to replace it. Some organizations want to change that. Insects are now being called mini-livestock by publications like "The Food Insects Newsletter." Whether that comes to pass in North America and Europe may be in question, but the enthusiasm of proponents is not. The newsletter reports that an entomologist who is the education coordinator for the Termite Outreach Program of the Audubon Zoo in New Orleans is hoping to find a pesticide-free source of termites to entice locals into cooking with them. New Orleans, with its tasty jambalayas made using crayfish (an arthropod) may be just the place to introduce other arthropods like termites and crickets. Go to a version of this story with more photos.
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