|
|
|
Meal Ticket, meet Meal Cricket
The Web site for the award-winning alternative weekly, the Philadelphia City Paper.
Meal Ticket, meet Meal Cricket
 |
| Mealworm jun with crickets |
| Henry Hong | Baltimore City Paper |
Much as it pains us, we are not the only City Paper around. Baltimore is home to a doppelganger alt-weekly that, to our continued agony, scooped up the citypaper.com URL just seconds before we did. The second-class ".net" designation is a chip we will wear on our collective shoulder forever.
Moving on: Baltimore City Paper serves up some pretty tasty food features and has the lowdown on the hippest restaurants in that crab-tastic metropolis. In her Eat feature "Meal Cricket," Violet Glaze seeks to solve the world's protein crisis while assuaging her sort-of-vegan guilt by farming and cooking up insects.
When you examine the data, eating insects looks like the solution to all our food-supply ills. Insects are cheap, plentiful, nutritious (full of protein and trace minerals, with only a smidgen of unsaturated fat), and raising them is ecologically sound. It takes 100 pounds of feed to raise 45 pounds of cricket meat, as opposed to the incredibly wasteful ratio of 100 pounds of grain to every 10 pounds of beef. Also, raising insects doesn't require a landscape-bespoiling, water-guzzling, manure-caked feedlot — just an aquarium with a lid, plus food and water. Practically every culture and every nation in human history has eaten insects, either intentionally as main dishes or as stowaways in the grain supply.
The article leads the reader on a merry chase through Glaze's attempts at farming crickets (not so successful) and managing mealworms (slightly better results). She winds up in a friend's restaurant, where the insects are stir-fried in a wok and merged into a scallion pancake (jun). Initial taste-test results are encouraging:
A funny thing happens when you're about to eat an insect for the first time. Your hand involuntarily jerks back a few times on the way to the plate, as if your brain is saying, "Whoa, cowboy--you sure you want to eat that?" There's a pregnant moment when you're about to pop it in your mouth, a feeling that there's no turning back from this culinary rubicon. Then you leap into the abyss . . . and land in a big feather bed. Crickets taste good...They have that singed, crispy protein flavor that's essential to the bouquet of pork rinds, with a delicate, savory sweetness that's not unlike what we associate with shrimp, except without the salt water/iodine tang of seafood. Our faces registered with astonishment at how good they were as we popped another toasty, savory handful in our mouths.
Having consumed wok-fried crispy crickets and mealworms, Glaze begins to realize that perhaps insects alone won't save our stressed food chain.
Here's the hard truth about eating insects: Your limit is about a dozen. You can put them in casseroles, you can fry them up in pancakes, you can gussy them up like haute cuisine and serve them with shots of soju strong enough to anesthetize a horse, but at some point your brain intervenes and, without any overt retching or revulsion, you just decide you've had enough. Even the most unsqueamish carnivore, the kind of person who shlucks down raw oysters and happily chomps his way through liver and sweetbreads would hesitate at the heaping two cups of crickets you need to approximate the protein value of a skimpy hamburger patty.
Violet Glaze, we salute your brave foray into alternative proteins, even if they can't save the world. If crickets with chili oil and sea salt ever make the menu of our most progressive Philadelphia restaurants, we'll order up, close our eyes, and just think "pork rinds."
- barstool scientist
- Booze
- Brew Revue
- Chef Salad
- Closings
- Coffee
- Contests
- Dealage
- Dirty Dishes
- Don't Front
- Eat This Immediately
- Field Trip
- Food and Art
- Food and Holidays
- Food and Movies
- Food and Music
- Food and Politics
- Food and Sports
- Food and Web
- Food Blogs
- Food Books
- Food Events
- Food News
- Food TV
- Gifted
- Happy Hour Hopper
- How-To
- In Print
- Interview
- Meal Ticket
- Menu Time
- Not So Quickfire
- Notes from the Weekend
- On Wheels
- Openings
- Patio Drinking
- Philly Beer Week 2010
- Photos
- Private Chef POV
- Product Placement
- Recipes
- Snack Time
- Stiff Drank
- SUPPER
- Tea
- Testing
- Ticket Stubs
- Top Chef
- Vegan
- Vegetarian
- Video
- Weekly Candy
- Weird Regional Foods
- We're Here to Help
- Where'd We Eat?
- Drew Lazor's Ill-Advised Rant Factory
- Pregame
- Ill-Advised Ranting
- The Week Without Meat
- Philly Beer Week 2009
- Real Big
- Where'd I Eat Last Night?
- Top Chef Masters
- The Good Word
- Next Iron Chef
- Arterial Terrorism
- Food and Radio
