According to a recent article in The New York Times, food that squirms, crawls or stings could be the next big favorite for fearless foodies. Forget burgers; think bugs. Take that worm out of the tequila bottle and put it on your taco. Tarantula, It’s What’s for Dinner.
The story described an evening at a restaurant in Brooklyn where 40 diners paid $85 each to eat a five-course Mexican meal that included yucca frites dotted with mealworms, a smoked corn custard sprinkled with crispy moth larvae and wax moth larvae that slithered in their bowls.
While bugs in American restaurants generally result in hysterical customers and a call to the heath department, eating them is nothing new in many parts of the world. In underdeveloped countries, insects are an alternative food source. They are known to provide superior nutrition and, probably, superior flavor.
And people who eat them regularly say they’re tasty. Which is, of course, what you’d expect people who eat bugs to say. So they describe wax moth larvae as tasting like bacon and mealworms as tasting like pumpkin seeds, although crickets, they concede, taste like crickets — which is not very enlightening.
There’s even a show on the Travel Channel extolling the joys of insect ingesting, with a host who travels to Cambodia for tarantulas and Ecuador for coconut grubs. It’s possible that the Brooklyn meal was an only-in-New York kind of thing that never will make it across the Hudson. Just because they served it there doesn’t mean they’ll serve it anywhere.
And, even if it does spread, New York dining trends, like Broadway shows, usually don’t reach the heartland for a generation or so.
Which gives us ample time to wonder: How many squirming moth larvae would you have to eat before you’ve had your fill?
My guess would be ... one.
Contact D.L. Stewart at dlstew_2000@yahoo.com
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