It’s a slow summer day at the Heller Nature Center in Highland Park, so Theresa Greinig, a staff naturalist here, has tossed together some fresh party mix to share with people who pass through. It looks tasty, with equal parts popcorn, Chex cereal, pretzels and–eewww!–are those dead bugs?
Oh yeah. Crickets and mealworms in fact, and they’re not just dead, they’re dry-roasted. And then stirred right into the party mix, until it looks like something you’d serve at a party gone really wrong.
“I also have a bowl of honey here if you want to dip some of these fried mealworms or crickets in that,” Greinig offers helpfully. “I didn’t have time to make Rice Krispies treats with crickets in them, but those are great, too.”
Stephanie Karp, a summer camp counselor for the local park district, passes by and notices the snacks. After only a little hesitation, she samples the fried crickets–hold the honey. “What it tastes like is the little skin on the outside of a peanut. It’s not awful,” Karp says. Just a short time later, she’ll find she likes them so much, she takes a few more home with her wrapped in a napkin.
Steve Leverick, a high school teacher from Highland Park, has been happily nibbling on crickets and mealworms for a while when he announces he’s thinking of handing out popcorn balls laced with fried bugs on Halloween.
Score two more converts to Greinig’s bug-eating crusade. Mealworms, crickets and the like are, after all, “high in protein, low in fat and cholesterol, and plentiful,” Greinig says. “Bugs could be a regular part of our diet if we could get over the squeamishness.” After a moment, she adds: “I can understand the squeamishness. It’s gross to have the legs of a bug stuck between your teeth.”
Promoting bug-eating is not in Greinig’s job description at the Park District of Highland Park, but she has made it her distinctive addition to the job of naturalist. She also takes kids on hikes, teaches about birds and their habitats, and otherwise tries to connect Highland Park residents with their natural surroundings. But it’s when she’s cooking and eating bugs that she believes she’s making her best contribution.
“People need to know that the natural world isn’t this big horrible scary place; the insects and animals aren’t going to come out of the forest and grab you and eat you,” Greinig says. “I like to get people out to enjoy the natural things around them, and if it takes me eating a few bugs to get them enjoying themselves, I’m happy to do it.”
Among the bugs Greinig has eaten, either cooked or live, are mealworms, crickets, shieldbugs, waterbugs, green ants, slugs, grasshoppers and earthworms.
“I’ve cooked cockroaches, but I’ve never been able to eat one,” she notes, proving that even she has limits, even if hers are way, way out there.
Greinig, 28, grew up in Wheeling and Hawthorn Woods but didn’t start eating bugs until she was in college at Iowa State University. Headed for veterinary school, she was minoring in biology in 1995 when the department head invited a team of students to work in Australia researching prospects for eco-tourism in the Daintree rainforest.
Though her research was on the bandicoot, a ratlike marsupial, Greinig spent quite a bit of time with Australian aborigines, who taught the research group about their customs. “One of the things they utilize are green ants, about an inch long,” Greinig says. “They’re lime green and they produce vitamin C on their bodies. You can lick it right off their abdomen. You get a potent orange flavor and then you put the ant down and let it crawl away. Or you pop it in your mouth and swallow it. One way the ant goes free, the other it doesn’t, but it’s your choice.”
The aboriginal people told her group that ants have long been used to prevent colds and as a citrus flavoring in stews. “They eat other bugs too. Everything that’s around them, if it’s edible they use it,” she says. “It’s part of their culture that makes things like ants into wonderful treats instead of something gross.”
Michael Jeffords, senior professional entomologist at the Illinois Natural History Survey, agrees with Greinig’s idea that it’s just habit that keeps us from including bugs on our daily menu. “People in North America and Europeans don’t eat them, but almost everyone else on Earth eats insects and arachnids,” Jeffords says. “It could simply be because we’re in a temperate zone and insects haven’t been there in the quantities and sizes that made them [seem like] food. In tropical countries, a lot of those things are huge.”
Another proponent of feasting on crawly things notes that early Judaic culture included eating bugs. “In Leviticus, it says that eating locusts is kosher,” says David George Gordon, a former Shedd Aquarium biologist who now lives in Washington state and wrote the “Eat a Bug Cookbook.” “So at some point we were merrily munching away.”
Gordon’s theory is that when the West became an agricultural society, insects that infest crops came to be the farmer’s direct competitor. “We made all bugs our enemy, and we like to believe they should all be eliminated, not eaten.”
Gordon points out that Japanese farmers harvest the grasshoppers that invade their rice paddies; the bugs are later sold canned with teriyaki sauce. “They get two crops out of the same land,” he points out, “and it cuts the need for pesticides.”
The same tactic is available to local tomato gardeners, according to Jeffords. The tomato hornworm, the ugly, fat little marauder that munches on back-yard tomato plants, “is a nice little bag of protein. It’s edible and has no toxic chemicals in it. You can pluck it right off your tomatoes and eat it.” Some people will have an allergic reaction, he says, but most will simply get a little shot of protein. If they can get the horned monster down their throats, that is.
Popping a tomato hornworm is about where back-yard bug eating ought to end, Jeffords and Greinig both say. Some common critters, such as the monarch butterfly and its caterpillar, are toxic. Others can cause an allergic reaction. And even those that are not naturally toxic may be carrying residue of lawn chemicals or pesticides.
For her demonstrations, Greinig sometimes picks up crickets or mealworms at a pet store, but she worries about their origins and about chemical residue. More often she orders bugs from such mail-order firms as GrubCo, Rainbow Mealworms and Fluker Farms.
Bugs are shipped live, which is bad news if you don’t like to be reminded that your food once had a life but good news for insectivores like Greinig, who say the only tasty bug is a fresh-killed bug. “They start tasting really bad really fast, so you have to cook them right after they die,” she says. She puts bagged bugs in the freezer for an hour or so to slow them down, takes them out to wash and dry them, then returns them to the freezer for another 40 minutes to slow them all the way to death.
Some can be eaten live, but then there’s the nasty problem of the bug slithering or hopping around in your mouth. “And cooking live crickets is a mess,” Greinig notes. “They hop out of the pan and get all over your kitchen.”
Some bug chefs chop off the heads and legs to make the final product look more, ah, appetizing, but Greinig has her own method. After cooking, she shakes the bugs in a large-holed colander to break off “any legs or other parts that would get stuck between your teeth.”
From there, the culinary possibilities are endless: bugs dipped in honey, sprinkled over a pizza or cooked into recipes like Scorpion Scallopini out of Gordon’s book. Greinig usually limits her bug intake to snacks like trail mix, Rice Krispies treats and plain old fried bugs. And she only eats bugs professionally, not for fun. “If you go into my kitchen at home, you’re not going to find a bag of ants or anything,” she says. “Tonight for dinner, we’re having leftover spaghetti.”
As a 20-year vegetarian, I’m not one to eat anything that ever had a mother, but journalistic thoroughness required that I check this out. I gingerly worked my way up from the party mix to bugs dipped in honey, and on to bugs with no honey. Then Greinig upped the ante.
“You know, I have these jars of live mealworms and crickets. You should try them that way,” she said. “They go down easy.”
But do they come back up? I wondered.
Then suddenly, I don’t know how, she had me holding a handful of about 20 live, squiggly mealworms. “Go ahead,” she said.
And I did.
Now, I swear, I’ll never eat a single bug again.
I’ll eat them by the handful. You get more of the nutty flavor that way.
