Insects are equal and in some ways superior to large mammals as a source of the protein and nutrients we seek from meat. Larvae like those cooked by Martin and Martínez are high in the healthful omega fatty acids now being widely purveyed through dietary supplements.
"It's as complete a protein as the protein in cow's milk," says Franklin, who has studied entomophagy and is convinced that mass-rearing food insects could alleviate nutritional deficiencies among children in developing countries. "They've been eaten for eons, so we know they're relatively safe," he says. "They can live on just about anything, they reproduce very rapidly, they produce a high-quality product, and they produce lower greenhouse gases" than livestock operations.
Joseph Schell
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With all this to recommend them, why haven't insects gained widespread acceptance as a protein source? For one thing, they're not cheap. Almost no infrastructure exists for the large-scale production of food insects, let alone the kind of agricultural subsidies that bring inexpensive meat to our supermarkets. Bugs' resulting scarcity makes them, strangely enough, a luxury pantry item. Gracer says it's difficult to buy wax moth larvae, one of the most easily and commonly raised types of food bug, for less than $25 per pound.
Not everybody buys into the image of insects as a no-downside food. A study published in 2007 in the American Journal of Public Health determined that dried grasshoppers imported from Oaxaca were "highly contaminated" with lead from abandoned mines and the pottery they were cooked in, leading to lead poisoning among Latino children in Monterey County.
"Insects like grasshoppers and those with hard outer shells are great bio-accumulators, and in the case of being in leaded surroundings, they were accumulating lots of lead, and they were contaminated at extremely high levels," Margaret Handley, a UCSF professor of epidemiology and biostatistics who participated in the study, wrote in an e-mail to SF Weekly.
Concerns about such possible contamination led the San Francisco Department of Public Health to start looking last summer into La Oaxaqueña, a popular restaurant selling chapulines in the Mission District. Health inspector Kenny Wong says proprietor Harry Persaud said he could furnish some documentation indicating his grasshoppers came from a safe source in Mexico, but decided to not import more of the bugs. The restaurant closed down soon after the health department's inquiry began. Persaud could not be reached for comment.
Wong says that he and other health inspectors at the state and local level are going to need more guidance from federal authorities if insects' popularity as an edible product continues to grow. "People are taking it more seriously as a food source, so we need to look at it," he says. "The thing is, I can't look at it just as an inspector. It needs to be looked at from way up on top."
Even if a regulatory framework for edible bugs is established and an arsenal of delicious insect preparations developed, entomophagy advocates face a final hurdle: the deeply ingrained cultural aversion to insects as food that probably led you to grimace at the thought of eating a scorpion.
The more one thinks about it, the less rational it seems. What are the differences, really, between a shrimp and a grasshopper, a wax worm and escargot, caviar and ant eggs? (The latter are consumed in Mexico as a delicacy called escamoles.) Entomophagists have tried to re-brand the land-based arthropods with various cute names, such as "land shrimp" or, in Martin's formulation, "terra prawns." (She says she was told it sounded too similar to "terrifying prawns.") None of it seems to stick.
"Fundamentally, our problem with insects is a problem with critical-thinking skills," Gracer says. "We just assume they're bad because everyone has always told us they are."
Theories abound about the roots of that legacy. Bug-eating hasn't always been verboten in the Western world. As Gordon points out, no less a figure than John the Baptist subsisted on a diet of locusts and wild honey. Somewhere along the line, that tolerance for entomophagy was lost.
Some argue that pest insects became vilified as competitors for our primary agricultural food sources. Others speculate that Europe's temperate climate didn't offer the wide range of edible bugs that might have hooked its residents on entomophagy, like the people of Mesoamerica or Southeast Asia. Another view holds that industrial pesticide companies provoked mass revulsion toward insects in the second half of the 20th century with spooky ads about the evils of cockroaches, termites, and other bugs.
Emmet Brady, who runs the Oakland-based Insect News Network, says that our distaste for insects as food is rooted in the Western world's gradual withdrawal from and discomfort with wild things generally. "When spiritual traditions began to clamp down on nature, view nature as evil, insects were one of the easiest symbols of nature to demonize," he says. Of course, that doesn't explain our continued acceptance of, and reverence for, such symbols of nature as venison and wild salmon.
Yau, of MiniLivestock, tried to address and overcome anti-entomophagy sentiments with her final project in the graduate design program at the California College of the Arts. Her thesis, Minilivestock: Exploring Rhetorical Methods to Promote Consuming Insects as Food, examined different ways of processing and packaging mealworms to make them more palatable to American consumers. Among the innovations featured were a mill, similar to a pepper grinder, for crushing dried worms, and energy bars made with ground bugs and granola.
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