Thursday, November 18, 2010

Bug Banquet

I'm currently taking a general entomology course... it's helpful to brush up on things and this way I can be in line to TA the course later on. Today during lab, we had a "bug banquet" as we have been learning about the benefits of adding insects to our diets.

On the menu:

-Cricket pizza (crickets baked and seasoned).
-Waxworms and superworms fried in taco sauce.
-Crepes with mashed superworms mixed into the batter (I made those), cricket cranberry bread, and of course fig newtons (can't have figs without fig wasps inside).
-I also made the chocolate covered superworms. Baked them first so they were crunchy.

And the real star of the party... LIVE superworms wrapped in mango slices. Surprisingly a lot of people were game for the live insects, a few people even had more than one. I ate one, gagged a few times, but I held it down. It's not the taste but the textures and feeling it trying to crawl on your tongue. I'd much rather eat some softer insect larvae I think. There is much I could say about the benefits of entomophagy (insect eating) but I think I'll save that for another post (and after I've brushed the cricket tarsi out of my teeth!)

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Congrats on getting the superworm down! I've sampled most of the insects that I feed to my lizardy babies, but I've always balked at superworms ... I don't like the way they feel crawling on my hands, so I just can't bring myself to put one in my mouth. Ziggy Stardust (my beardie) loves them above all other foods, though, so I have two colonies of them on the go for his purposes.

Weird Bug Lady said...

Yeah I've never liked superworms much... I think I would have been ok with mealworms, they're smaller and softer. Superworms are big, mean and crunchy. Our beardie back home loves them!