Insects or Hot Dogs, It’s Just Protein

“Food preferences are highly local, often irrational,” writes Dana Goodyear in her piece on entomophagy, or insect-eating, in this week’s issue. Entomophagists, she reports, bemoan our prejudice against consuming bugs:

“In our minds, they’re associated with filth,” Heather Looy, a psychologist who has studied food aversions, said … “They go dirty places, but so do fungi, and we eat those all the time. And you don’t want to know about crabs and shrimp and lobster.” Crabs, shrimp, and lobster are, like insects, arthropods—but instead of eating fresh lettuces and flowers, as many insects do, they scavenge debris from the ocean floor.

This injustice—lobster is a delicacy, while vegetarian crustaceans like wood lice are unfit for civilized man—is a centerpiece of the literature of entomophagy.

There are ways to overcome food prejudices, however. (As Goodyear notes, there was a time when sushi had the same ick-factor that many Americans associate with eating bugs.) One way is to work with and study the offending creatures, as the members of the New York Entomological Society do. The Society’s hundredth-anniversary dinner, held at the Explorer’s Club, in 1992, drew the attention of Mark Singer, who described the menu in a Talk of the Town story called “Protein Source”: “Cricket and vegetable tempura, mealworm balls in zesty tomato sauce, roasted Australian kurrajong grubs….” Maria Calta, a writer for Eating Well, who was in attendance, explained to Singer that

a hundred-gram portion of giant silk moth caterpillars provides 112.2 per cent of the recommended daily adult allowance of riboflavin, 120 per cent of the copper, and 197.2 per cent of the iron…. “I am trying to free my mind from the cultural bias against eating bugs.”

Another way to free one’s mind from such cultural biases is to travel, and few of our reporters have travelled farther and eaten more widely than Ian Frazier and John McPhee. In his 2007 Personal History, “My Life List,” McPhee acknowledged that his accomplishments as an omnivore are “in no way comparable to Sandy Frazier’s…. In this field, Sandy is an idol—certainly my idol.” McPhee then went on to enumerate some of Frazier’s achievements:

He it was who improved his understanding of wild trout by filling his belly with brown-drake mayflies, chewing thoughtfully while they fluttered on his tongue (“If you’re into mayflies, it’s hard to eat just one”). He it is whose acquired tastes run to things like grasshopper juice and cricket thighs (“the feel of the cricket’s toothpicky legs between my teeth”). A gift of chocolate-covered ants and bees appealed to him less for the chocolate than for the “chitinous crunch.” Long known in these pages as Ian, a name unfairly thought to be a sign of personal aggrandizement, he reads Leviticus for the sheer pleasure of its culinary attention to “unclean creeping things.” That phrase belongs, Lord knows, to Leviticus, for it could never be from Sandy, who is incapable of writing such a description of anything, anywhere, that can qualify as protein.

A third, and perhaps more common way of overcoming one’s taboos against eating strange protein-sources is to have them introduced to you as a delicacy. In her piece, Goodyear mentions Max Ries, of Reese Finer Foods, who, in the nineteen-fifties, presented the American consumer with such items as “French-fried ants from Venezuela and baby bees from Japan.” Ries was excluded from the first Fancy Food Show, in 1955, but later became a fixture at the annual event. The New Yorker, for many years, dispatched a Talk of the Town writer to cover the show and report on coming fancy-food trends. In the course of sampling the delicacies on offer in 1974, Lillian Ross encountered one of the event’s organizers, who was eating a hot dog on a bun, with sauerkraut.

“What’s the idea?” we asked, watching her take a bite of the hot dog.

“I got it out on the street, at the corner,” she told us without apology. “Surrounded by all this glamour, I always get a yen for something more prosaic.”

“Most of the world eats bugs,” Goodyear writes, and there are doubtless plenty of people around the globe who’d find a grasshopper to be much more prosaic than a New York City dirty-water dog.

_The articles—and the complete archives of The New Yorker, back to 1925—are available to subscribers. Non-subscribers can purchase the individual issues.

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Photograph by Hans Gissinger.