Eating up the bugs

Sweet potato-nut dip with chunks of grasshopper on Cassava chips

I love to cook. Even more so, I love to eat. I pride myself on the fact that I strive for difference in my culinary choices, whether it’s what I’m cooking or where I decide to eat away from home.

When I attended George Brown College for Food and Beverage Management we had a course in which we were assigned an essay on something culinary. Most students chose normal topics such as the great French menu innovator Escoffier, or the modern influences of Asian cuisine and ‘fusion’ cooking in North America. I did my essay on Entomophagy, which means eating insects.

I was therefore very interested when a friend passed a newspaper article my way this week about Bug feast, the 4th annual culinary fair involving critter recipes. Cambridge’s Wings of Paradise Butterfly Conservatory is the home of this year’s African themed event, which has grown greatly in popularity and in culinary prowess over the past three-plus years. Chef Jeff Stewart, a professor at Niagara College’s Culinary Institute is mainly responsible for this, as he has been the one in charge of creating the bug recipes for the past three years.

So off we went to Cambridge in search of new taste experiences.

The bug eats were set up in a small room just off to the left of the conservatory’s main lobby. Dish 1 was a sweet potato-nut dip visibly spiked with chunks of grasshopper that was to be eaten on Cassava chips. The taste was quite good, very nutty and earthy. The grasshoppers were undetectable. Dish 2 was a chunky tomato onion sauce sautéed with chopped Mopani worms and served on a warmed polenta-like base. Great taste, mostly tomato and onion, but those little worm chunks added an interesting raisin-like texture. Now it was time for dessert. Dish 3 was something called Kashata, a traditional African sugar based treat that Stewart had flavoured with coconut, peanuts, Amarula liqueur and giant carpenter ants. This was then cut into bars for sampling. Very tasty and sweet, yet no insect flavour could be found. I bit directly into an ant, and the raisin texture came to mind again. Lastly, we tried dark chocolate poured on crickets and banana. Yummy. It reminded me of a Cadbury Fruit and Nut bar, but the fruit was really bug protein.

All and all this was an interesting eating experience. I would love to see a more risky approach to this event, with the recipes focusing more on accompanying the flavour of the insects themselves, rather than using the insect flavour or texture as the accompaniment to the dish. Although I did ‘eat bugs’, I can’t really say I know what they taste like. My odd culinary desires surface once again…

Photograph by Andrew Masse