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daunting technical challenge. Insect protein does not take the form of muscle, but is, as he put it, “goopy.”
    In Dicke’s opinion, simply changing the language surrounding food insects could go a long way toward solving the problem that Westerners have with them. “Maybe we should stop telling people they’re eating insects,” he said. “If you say it’s mealworms, it makes people think of ringworm. So stop saying ‘worm.’ If we use the Latin names, say it’s a
Tenebrio
quiche, it sounds much more fancy, and it’s part of the marketing.” Another option, Dicke said, is to cover the bugs in chocolate, because people will eat anything covered in chocolate.
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    T he practice of ethical entomophagy started haphazardly. In 1974, Gene DeFoliart, who was the chair of entomology at the University of Wisconsin, was asked by a colleague to recommend someone who could talk about edible insects as part of a symposium on unconventional protein sources. Then, as now, entomology was more concerned with insect eradication than cultivation, and, not finding a willing participant, DeFoliart decided to take on the project himself. He began his talk—and the paper he eventually published—with a startling statement: “C. F. Hodge (1911) calculated that a pair of houseflies beginning operations in April could produce enough flies, if all survived, to cover the earth forty-seven feet deep by August,” he said. “If one can reverse for a moment the usual focus on insects as enemies of man, Hodge’s layer of flies represents an impressive pile of animal protein.”
    DeFoliart, who died in early 2013, envisioned a place for edible insects as a luxury item. The larvae of the wax moth (
Galleria
mellonella
)
seemed to him to be poised to become the next escargot, which in the late eighties represented a three-hundred-million-dollar-a-year business in the United States. “Given a choice, New York diners looking for adventure and willing to pay $22 for half a roasted free-range chicken accompanied by a large pile of shoestring potatoes might well prefer a smaller pile of
Galleria
at the same price,” he wrote. He and a handful of colleagues, including Florence Dunkel, now a leading entomophagist and a professor at Montana State University, in Bozeman, began to study and promote the potential of what they called “mini-livestock.” In
The Food Insects Newsletter,
their journal, they reported the results of nutritional analyses and assessed the efficiency of insects like crickets—the most delectable of which, entomophagists are fond of pointing out, belong to the genus
Gryllus
.
    A couple of years ago, a group of DeFoliart’s disciples gathered at a resort in San Diego for a symposium on entomophagy at the annual conference of the Entomological Society of America. Because there is no significant funding available for entomophagy research, it has never been taken seriously by most professional entomologists. Dunkel, who in her half century in academia has many times heard colleagues discourage interested graduate students, often finds herself at odds with others in her field. It was a relief, then, to be among the like-minded. “Your soap-moth-pupae chutney—I’ll never forget how that tasted!” she said, introducing a colleague from the Insectarium, in Montreal, which holds a bug banquet every other year. The entomophagists hoped to capitalize on the momentum they perceived. “We don’t have to be the kooky, nerdy entomologists who eat bugs because we’re crazy,” an entomologist from the University of Georgia said. “Twenty years ago, sushi was the
eww
factor; you did not see sushi in grocery stores. Now it’s the cultural norm.”
    At the conference, Dunkel talked about her frustration working in West Africa, where for decades European and American entomologists,