Eating Insects in New Orleans

There was always that one kid on the playground who would eat a bug for a quarter. Inflation may have raised the prices since I was last on a playground, but the shock value of seeing a peer crunch down on some kind of crawly was always well worth dipping into your lunch money. As it happens, though, that kid was onto something; not only was he, technically, running a small business, but he was also at the forefront of a potential revolution in cuisine. Entomophagy, or the eating of insects, has become a source of increasing interest in the past several years. The Audubon Butterfly Garden & Insectarium on Canal Street in New Orleans has embraced this trend with the establishment of Bug Appétit, a café featuring a demonstration kitchen where a few straightforward insect-based dishes are prepared—and offered as samples. 

For people who say they will never eat insects, Chief Entomologist Zack Lemann has two responses: what do you think crawfish really are and what did you think about sushi in 2002? The idea of “food” is very cultural, of course, but those norms can shift, and raw fish can go from a punchline to a ubiquitous trend in under a generation. Insects are easy to raise, extremely efficient in converting feed into edible mass (a pound of insect feed turns into about a pound of edible insects, but it takes several pounds of feed to add a pound of beef to a cow), and sometimes surprisingly nutritious: red ants and termites are full of calcium, and caterpillars pack a lot of iron and protein. Articles are often written about the practical benefits of entomophagy (technical note: according to the word roots, entomophagy means eating insects, but the culinary trend embraces several groups of related arthropods that aren’t technically insects but are, culturally, bugs.) based on exactly these points, but I wanted to understand the more interesting aspects: how do you get the bugs, how do you prepare them, and how do they taste?

For his own meals, Lemann sometimes goes “hunting”: scooping up termites and dragonflies in a net and luring in waterbugs with a light in the swamp. For Bug Appétit, he’s able to source from farms that raise “crops” to serve as pet food, focusing on proven lizard-pleasers like mealworms, waxworms, and small crickets. (Fluker Farms, in Port Allen, is among their suppliers.) Since these bugs are food-grade, there’s no issue with the health inspector at Bug Appétit, though authorities occasionally require more emphatic reassurance when Lemann does demonstrations on the road. 

When we arrived at the café, there were a few pre-made dishes for me to try. Lemann described Chocolate Chirp Cookies, small chocolate chip cookies garnished with a roasted cricket, as the “gateway bug;” they tasted like a chocolate chip cookie with a mild nuttiness, sort of an “oh-did-you-add-pecans” note. Next easiest was the Red Pepper Cricket Hummus, which incorporated cricket flour and tasted like … good hummus. 

After these relatively disguised examples came the main course—and no deniability. The bugs weren’t just an ingredient but the whole show: Crispy Cajun Crickets, Southwest Waxworms, and Cinnamon Bug Crunch (waxworms in cinnamon and sugar)—all good, and manageably crispy. At some point during the visit, I could even say “well, just one more,” with the Crispy Cajun Crickets being the ones I most nearly filled my pockets with to eat on the streetcar. The Six-Legged Salsa, featuring mealworms, was a heavier lift; it was good, but oh, it certainly looked like salsa with mealworms in it. I refused to try the mango chutney because I hate mangoes, but the photographer liked it.

Guests started to trickle in, and Lemann started his presentation. I was in the background, wearing a sous-chef apron and trying to be helpful, which meant I was usually in the way. Couples, siblings, and parent-child pairs dared each other to try the dishes; most people tried at least a cookie or some hummus and only one girl actually hid from her mother, but the sauces had relatively few takers. 

When it was time to demonstrate the actual cooking, Lemann had me melt some butter in a small cast-iron skillet (a reassuring first step), then add some crickets that had been roasted beforehand. I stirred them around so each Jiminy could get his buttery coating, then added spices (largely, but not exclusively, Tony Chachere’s). I couldn’t tell when they were done, but Lemann had me take them off the burner after about five minutes. The results were delightful—fresh-fried, the flavors seemed richer, and I braved a whole handful as opposed to my very careful one-by-one sampling. As Lemann said to the nice family from New Jersey who shared the fresh crickets with us: “Did you expect anything less from a Southern kitchen?”

What makes a bug good to eat, and how can you tell which might be worth making a meal out of? There are a few rough guidelines. In general, you want something that is some combination of relatively large, slow, and abundant (unless of course, you get your supply from a farm): it’s hard to make a meal out of something tiny and maddening or to rely on something rare. Camouflaged insects, broadly speaking, tend to taste better, since the reason they’re camouflaged is so predators can’t find them for a snack; vividly colored insects, by the same token, don’t really need to conceal themselves because they taste terrible, and animals that might feed on them generally only make that mistake once. Some orders of insects tend to contain tastier members, particularly orthopterans (grasshoppers, crickets, and similar), coleopterans (beetles and their larvae), and non-venomous hymenopterans (ants, bees, and similar insects). Common sense also plays a role—armored millipedes would be a lot of trouble to eat even if they didn’t generally taste bad, and urban or suburban insects might be contaminated with pollutants or pesticides. 

Flavor is notoriously hard to describe, but there seems to be a consensus that the subtle but pleasant savory flavor of a cricket is somehow nut-like, which I discerned myself. The worms clocked in a little richer, a little fattier, but still … you know …  nutty. Apparently this is not a universal flavor profile: mayflies taste a little like celery, honeypot ants are a sweet delight, and dragonflies remind Lemann of softshell crabs. Perhaps most surprisingly, giant waterbugs, which have the alarming common names “toe-biters” and “alligator ticks,” contain comparatively large chest muscles that, when carefully extracted, taste like banana oil. Lemann uses morsels of this meat to make “swamp smores,” using it in place of the marshmallow. 

There are a few surprising bugs on some people’s menus: tarantulas taste good (“but you have to raise them for a while for them to get big enough, and then you feel bad”), and some people preserve scorpions in vodka for consumption. Lemann doesn’t care for them, since they mostly taste like vodka after this process; but a rough-and-tumble landlady I used to have got stung by a wild scorpion on a camping trip and, as her vengeance, spit-roasted it over the campfire and chowed down. In her words: “It tasted like crab, which I didn’t care for, but you probably would have.”

423 Canal Street, New Orleans, La.
audubonnatureinstitute.org/insectarium