Cicada: The Other, Other White Meat

[Guest guest]

By Cameron W. Barr

When buzzing hordes of 17-year cicadas rise from the earth next month,

some people will marvel, some will cower, some will shrug their shoulders.

Jacques Tiziou, a Frenchman-turned-American who lives in a tree-fringed

colonial in Northwest (DC), will gather as many as he can, eating a few

right away and saving the rest for later. Silver-bearded and gentle of

disposition, he speaks in accented English that makes even bugs sound

irresistible.

" You're going to grab one and put it in your mouth alive, " he says with a

twinkle in his eye. " You have to. "

Tiziou offers a guest two ways of consuming a few of the cicadas he still

has in his freezer from 1987, the year of their last emergence in the

Washington area. Some he sautes, leaving them enrobed in parsley and butter.

And some he presents plain, black things about as big as the top half of

your pinky, wingless but still leggy, on a little white saucer.

Cicada-eating has a long history on this continent. The original

inhabitants ate them. The current population is less enthralled, or maybe

less hungry. Either way, some people are trying to revive human cicada

consumption.

At Fahrenheit, a restaurant in the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in town,

cicadas almost made the menu this year. " The soft-shelled cicada, it's done

just like a soft-shelled crab, " says executive chef Belosic,

describing how freshly molted cicadas should be rolled in flour, pan-fried

in olive oil, and finished with a sauce of white wine, butter and shallots.

Served as an appetizer, the dish would have cost diners $10 or so.

" Higher-ups, " Belosic adds, crushed the idea, in order not " to scare people

away. "

Such is the hard slog of the enterprising American entomophage -- the

eater of insects. In many parts of the world, people ingest bugs with

regularity and even delight. In Western countries, insect-eating triggers

the gag reflex.

Consider Kara Watkins, a waitress from Modesto, Calif., who consumed three

live potato bugs on an April episode of NBC's " Fear Factor " as her

co-contestants giggled convulsively.

" They were freaky-looking, " she says of her six-legged snacks in an

interview on the show's Web site. " They were huge. I didn't want them to

bite me so I bit off their heads first and then popped in their bodies. They

tasted like vomit. "

" They're totally in the process of making things look yucky, " sighs

Gordon, a science writer in Port Townsend, Wash., and the author of

" The Eat-A-Bug Cookbook. " For him, insects are items of haute cuisine, and

the cicadas about to emerge in the eastern United States should be

considered a delicacy. " They have a nutty flavor, " he says, " almost like a

pistachio nut. "

Gordon's cookbook offers a recipe for cicada-topped pizza. As an

accompaniment, he suggests a crisp chardonnay or a semillon blanc. He also

recommends you begin drinking as you cook, " to fortify yourself. "

Although Americans are gradually increasing their intentional insect intake

-- a few bug parts get into everything from apple butter to wheat flour --

the practice remains more a matter of novelty than nutrition. But when the

billions of cicadas belonging to Brood X (the X stands for 10) leave their

underground habitats next month, people who want to taste a bug may find

their garage doors laden with opportunities.

The brood is one of 15 batches of periodical cicadas, a set of species

unique to the eastern United States. The insects spend 13 or 17 years

underground before emerging into a cacophonous adulthood that lasts only a

few weeks and consists of mating, egg-laying and dying. Entomologists expect

the cicadas to emerge in the District and about 15 states beginning in mid-

to late May.

The males will create their trademark din, and cicadas of both sexes may

startle and annoy the people in their midst, but the insects do not sting or

bite. For many birds, mammals and reptiles, the cicadas will provide weeks

of meals.

Experienced cicada-eaters advise would-be entomophages to be alert for the

mass emergence that will begin one May evening, when nymphs -- as many as

1.5 million per acre -- will crawl out of the soil and head for a vertical

surface, usually a tree.

There they will molt, taking about an hour to squeeze out of their

dust-colored skins. Once they have broken free, it is your moment to strike:

Pluck the creamy white adults off the trees. Gather as many as you desire

for the culinary adventures ahead. Admire their red eyes and furled wings.

Do hurry. The exoskeletons of the newly molted adults will turn black

within about 12 hours and harden over the next couple days. Once that

happens, the cicadas remain eminently edible but they lose their soft-shell

cachet. They're also easier to apprehend in their just-molted stage.

If you don't want to eat your cicadas right off the tree, cookbook author

Gordon recommends placing your bounty in the freezer. " It's a dignified

death; they drift off into a deep sleep and never feel any pain, " he says.

With your cicada supply on ice, the options unfold.

Native Americans dry roasted them using fire-heated rocks. Zyla, an

amateur naturalist in Ridge, in southern St. 's County, suggests laying

a few dozen on a cookie sheet and baking them in a 350-degree oven for five

minutes.

Then serve with toothpicks and a selection of condiments for dipping,

ranging from sweet to savory: chocolate sauce, honey, melted cheese,

ketchup, mustard. Viola: cicada fondue.

The females, loaded with eggs, are more of a bite than the males, whose

abdomens are largely hollow, in part because of the anatomical structures

that allow them to make noise. Zyla likens the dry-roasted males to an

" air-puffed Cheeto. "

Some purists simply boil cicadas for a minute or two, in order to better

appreciate their flavor. Other entomophages recommend stir-frying them; they

will absorb the flavors of the rest of the dish. Some aficionados like their

cicadas battered and deep-fried.

Grubco Inc., a Fairfield, Ohio, company that is one of the nation's leading

suppliers of edible insects, reports that human consumption is rising.

Company President Dale Cochran estimates that he sells 20,000 crickets,

mealworms and wax worms every week to people who will eat the insects or

serve them to others. A decade ago, he sold a quarter as many bugs for human

consumption. " It goes in cycles, " he says. " The 'Fear Factor' show has kind

of increased demand, and at Halloween time we get quite a few people

ordering them. "

" The overall idea of eating insects is probably more widely accepted than

it was 20 years ago in the U.S., " adds Tom Turpin, professor of entomology

at Purdue University and founder of the Bug Bowl, an annual festival focused

on insects that begins today in West Lafayette, Ind.

More than 30,000 people were expected to attend this year's two-day event,

three times the number that showed up five years ago. Thousands of Bug

Bowl-goers consume a stir-fried mealworm or a chocolate-dipped grasshopper.

Still, persuading people to eat a bug isn't easy. " We've all grown up to

think of insects as basically the enemy, " says Schauff, a research

entomologist at the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Not so in Asia, where Thais munch on fried grasshoppers and Japanese eat

the rice grasshopper known as hashi, a practice that curbs the need to use

pesticides in the paddies. Africans adore locusts and many varieties of

caterpillars. Many people in Central and South America consume ants,

grasshoppers, stink beetles, and, well, the list is long.

Bug-eating enthusiasts suggest that Americans should include a few more

insects in their diet. At a time when the safety of many sources of protein

-- from beef to salmon -- is being called into question, insects offer an

alternative. Shrimp and lobsters, part of the same biological phylum that

includes bugs, are essentially sea insects. No one thinks twice about

spreading toast with honey, known among wise-cracking entomologists as " bee

vomit. "

" If we broadened our palate, " says Gordon, " we'd have a much better time of

surviving in large numbers. "

Chez Tiziou, the buffet awaits. " By itself, [a cicada] doesn't have much

taste, you know, " he says.

He's right. His delightful parsley-and-garlic butter certainly perks up the

insect's gastronomic appeal. Served plain, cicadas have more crunch than

flavor.

Once they're in the mouth, the unmistakable feeling is one of anticlimax.

In the end, a cicada is just another creature available for the eating. And

like anything else that's been frozen for 17 years, the plain ones taste

like freezer.