Read Online Anything That Moves by Dana Goodyear - Free Book Online Page B

preferences are highly local, often irrational, and defining: a Frenchman is a frog because he considers their legs food and the person who calls him one does not. In Santa María Atzompa, a community in Oaxaca where grasshoppers toasted with garlic, chili, and lime are a favorite treat, locals have traditionally found shrimp repulsive. “They would say ‘some people’ eat it, meaning ‘the coastal people,’” Ramona Pérez, an anthropologist at San Diego State University, says. When she made scampi for a family there, she told me, they were appalled; the mother, who usually cooked with her, refused to help, and the daughters wouldn’t eat. The coast is less than a hundred miles away.
    Eighty percent of the world eats bugs. Australian Aborigines like witchetty grubs, which, according to the authors of
Man Eating Bugs,
taste like “nut-flavored scrambled eggs and mild mozzarella, wrapped in a phyllo dough pastry.” Mealworms are factory-farmed in China; in Venezuela, children roast tarantulas. Besides, as any bug-eater will tell you, we are all already eating bugs, whether we mean to or not. According to the FDA, which publishes a handbook on “defect levels” acceptable in processed food, frozen or canned spinach is not considered contaminated until it has fifty aphids, thrips, or mites per hundred grams. Peanut butter is allowed to have thirty insect fragments per hundred grams, and chocolate is OK up to sixty. In each case, the significance of the contamination is given as “aesthetic.”
    In fresh vegetables, insects are inevitable. One day, cleaning some lettuce, I was surprised by an emerald-green pentagon with antennae: a stinkbug. I got rid of it immediately—force of habit. But daintiness about insects has true consequences. As Tom Turpin, an entomologist at Purdue University, said, “Attitudes in this country result in more pesticide use, because we’re scared about an aphid wing in our spinach.”
    The antipathy that Europeans and their descendants display toward eating insects is stubborn, and mysterious. Insect consumption is in our cultural heritage. The Romans ate beetle grubs reared on flour and wine; ancient Greeks ate grasshoppers. Leviticus, by some interpretations, permits the eating of locusts, grasshoppers, and crickets. (The rest are unkosher.) The manna eaten by Moses on his way out of Egypt is widely believed to have been honeydew, the sweet excrement of scale insects. Turpin thinks it comes down to expedience. Unlike bugs found in the tropics, those found in Europe do not grow big enough to make good food, so there is no culinary tradition, and therefore no infrastructure, to support the practice. He told me, “If there were insects out there the size of pigs, I guarantee you we’d be eating them.”
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    T he next stinkbug I came across I ate. It was lightly fried, and presented on a slice of apple, whose flavor it is said to resemble. (I found it a touch medicinal.) This was in a one-story white clapboard house in the West Adams neighborhood of Los Angeles, with a skateboard half-pipe in the backyard. The house had been rented by Daniella Martin and Dave Gracer, two advocates of entomophagy, under false pretenses. “We told them we were scientists,” Martin said, giggling. In fact, Martin, who used to be an Internet game-show host, writes a blog called
Girl Meets Bug
; she and Gracer, an English instructor who travels the country lecturing on entomophagy and has been writing an epic poem about insects for the past fourteen years, were in town to compete in a cooking competition at the Natural History Museum’s annual bug fair.
    Martin, who is in her mid-thirties, with a heart-shaped face and a telegenic smile, stood at the counter in the small kitchen pulling embryonic drones—bee brood—from honeycomb. They were for bee patties, part of a “Bee L T”