Popping Hoppers

 

     Ah, Summer, when we can finally curl up in a lawn chair by the pool with the sun over our shoulder and a towel across our knees. We open that thick mystery we've been saving since Christmas, reach over into the big Tupperware bowl, grab a handful of deep-fried crickets, and settle down for a good long read.

     Before the reader begins to look for legs and antennae hanging out of the corners of this column, let me publicly state that I am a good red-meat American burger chomper and that my interest in eating insects is mostly scientific, so far.  

     That interest began fifty years ago in Burgdorf, Idaho, when I was snowed away from civilization for six months at a time and attempted to read the Bible from front to back. Of particular note was the eleventh chapter of Leviticus, in which the Lord lays out to Moses and Aaron those things which may be eaten and those which are to be abominated. 

      The chapter begins with a provision that food critters should be cloven-hoofed and cud-chewing, a passage I'm sure the American Beef Council has been tempted to use in its television campaign.  ("What's for dinner?  Beef, as the Lord commandeth.")

There follows a long list of unclean and abominated foods, including the camel, swine, seafood that lacks fin and scale, eagle, osprey, vulture, raven, owl, swan, stork, and bat, before we get to Verses 21 and 22, which in the King James edition state:

      2l.  Yet these may ye eat of every flying creeping thing that goeth upon all four, which have legs above their feet, to leap withal upon the earth;

    22. Even these of them ye may eat: the locust after his kind, and the bald locust after his kind, and the beetle after his kind, and the grasshopper after his kind.

    I am advised to give up my passion for BLT's, for camel steak and spotted owl soup, but it was perfectly fine to pop a few grasshoppers on the grill or toss a few beetles in with the beans.  Let us look into locusts.

     The type of locust that Moses and Aaron were permitted to munch while curled up with a good stone tablet was probably Schistocera gregaria, the desert locust, ranging from south-central Africa to northern Iran.  It is the characteristic of this hopper's life cycle that its eggs lie dormant in desert soils until moistened by a good wet rain, when there is a simultaneous hatching of billions of individuals, which, by adulthood, have devoured every stalk of vegetable matter in the neighborhood and then swarmed to fly off toward greener pastures.

     These swarms may contain 40 billion locusts and cover an area of two hundred square miles at an altitude of ten thousand feet. Rather than simply lifting off in, say, Somalia and finding a new home close to the Tower of Babel, what actually happens in the dynamics of the swarm is that individual locusts within the swarm tire-out and get hungry at different rates, so there is total crop destruction along the entire path of the migration, a constant fall-out of hoppers that grab a bite, take a nap, then flutter on.

     These locusts eat the same things as people and animals. Couple that with the fact that locusts are more likely to be around during good wet years, when dryland farming is most successful, and the  survival wisdom in the Bible passage emerges.  It is practical to allow the eating of locusts when bugs are the only things left to eat, after they have ruined all the other choices.

     So, have a nibble. If you don’t happen to have a stash of edible bugs in the pantry, Amazon sells a variety of possibilities including chili-lime crickets, bug kebab, mango-habanero crickets, honey mustard crickets, salted black ants, cricket flour brownie mix, and a jungle trail mix that includes giant water scorpions, armor tail scorpions, and diving beetles. 

      Roasted crickets, at 60 percent protein and 28 percent fat, while not as nutritious as bee pupae, are comparable to the average hamburger, although a bit more difficult to keep on the bun. Call me old-school. I have had trouble adjusting to the current thirteen-dollar price tag for a restaurant cheeseburger, but times are going to have to get a little tougher before I order the Italian lasagna-flavored cricket entrée with a side of sour cream and onion flavored earthworms. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Random Thoughts        The morning of the 14 th  of June, 2024, began normally enough. Tink, my lap guard dog, watered a postage stamp of the backyard lawn while I pried the lid off a big can of Prince Albert and filled my pipe for the first dose of a fresh day. Everything was going great.      Then the bluebirds of happenstance swept in from the unknown. On our way back into the house I became dizzy, whirly. light headed. When I reached the top porch step, I fell backward, down to the lower level and broke my neck in five places.       One hundred days later, in late September, I made it back home, after a life flight to Spokane, a session with a neurosurgeon who patched vertebrae with what in Xrays look to be parts from a metal gate, a fitting for a neck brace, a week in the hospital, a month in a Spokane rehab joint in which I contracted Covid and had my wallet stolen, then two months in a facil...
Read more
Being Rich       I grew up in a union household where being rich smelled of worker exploitation.  I am old now and my thousand bucks a month Social Security check ensures that I will never be accused of ill-gotten rewards. My daughter and I were recently discussing how diddled we, as members of the working class, were becoming because our leaders are greedy people when she reminded me of how we once felt rich, during the Wendy’s era.       We were living between Petaluma and Point Reyes, northern California, while I took care of an assortment of horses, cattle, sheep, hogs, dogs, and poultry, including peacocks, on a couple hundred acres of prime Marin County pasture.       The property was bordered on the north by Red Hill Road that began in Petaluma then snaked up and down through San Francisco’s milk supply and ended up twenty miles west at Point Reyes National Seashore and the big blu...
Read more
The Kitchen Radio      On the prairies of western Nebraska, a plastic AM radio tuned to KCOW was a standard  kitchen appliance. It provided gossipy news, country music, Kiddie Carnival, and tornado warnings, sunrise until dark. That is where I learned the words and tune to Teddy Bears’ Picnic.       After sunset, the outside world flooded the kitchen. AM frequencies from thousands of miles away skipped into the Sandhills. One of the strongest signals was from XELO, Juarez, broadcasting from just across the Rio Grande from El Paso, out of reach of US regulators.       That was where I first heard Heartbreak Hotel, Love Me Tender, Bebopaloola, Waiting for a Train. The frequencies were taken over late at night by what we called Holy Rollers. The piece that follows is an example of their programming. I once had a recording of this broadcast so I could demonstrate to my effete FM-listening east coa...
Read more