Lovely Grub: Are Insects the Future of Food?
I asked him whether I was foolish to eat the mealworm quiche. “It depends on how cautious you are and how adventurous you feel,” he says diplomatically. “I guess I’m more of an evidence-based person.”
Eating the mealworm quiche gave me a good sense of what the insectivores are up against. The dish tasted perfectly fine – the mealworms had a slightly nutty, toasted flavor and gave the quiche an extra crunch – but it still made my stomach turn. After taking a few bites, I found myself pushing the quiche to the side of my plate. I pulled a piece of bread off the top of my insect-free cheese sandwich and used it to cover the quiche; I didn’t want to look at the worms while I was eating the rest of my lunch. But I’d survived the quiche and the maggot fat at that first tasting by the Nordic Food Lab. Over my week in the Netherlands, I’d tried other delicacies: locust tabbouleh, chicken crumbed in buffalo worms; bee larvae ceviche; tempura-fried crickets; rose beetle larvae stew; soy grasshoppers; char-grilled sticky rice with wasp paste; buffalo worm, avocado, and tomato salad; a cucumber, basil, and locust drink; and a fermented, Asian-style dipping sauce made from grasshoppers and mealworms.
Although I found many of the dishes to be psychologically difficult to stomach, none of them actually tasted bad. The insects themselves were quite bland. The crickets had a slightly fishy aftertaste, and the buffalo worms a metallic one. The rose beetle larvae were vaguely reminiscent of smoked ham. Mostly, the insects were carriers for whatever other, stronger flavors were in a dish.
In fact, the Nordic Food Lab’s Josh Evans and Ben Reade declared they are tasting a failure, largely because the star ingredients – which came from Dutch insect farms – were nearly flavorless. The insects were a far cry from the delectable specimens they’d caught in the wild during their research trips around the world.
Over the past year, they’ve been to five continents and discovered an astonishing world of insect flavor. In Australia, they savored the sweet-and-sour tang of honey ants and sampled scale insect larvae, which taste like fresh mushrooms and pop softly in the mouth. In Uganda, they feasted on queen termites, which are fatty – like little sausages – with the texture of sweetbreads, the fragrance of foie gras, and a delicate sweetness. In Mexico, they enjoyed escamoles, desert ant eggs with a creamy mouthfeel, and the aroma of blue cheese.