Brood Awakening

There are bugs in my pasta. 

I don’t mean a passing fly. I mean inch-long insects. I can see the venation on their wings, the stripes on their carapaces, their little legs stilled forever by a fryer. 

I’m going to eat this? I’m going to eat this. 

I’m at a private home outside Asheville for a fundraising dinner benefiting the health care nonprofit Vecinos in late August. The meal is the brainchild of activist Lauren Steiner and forager Alan Muskat, who challenged six local chefs to prepare a five-course gourmet meal where every dish features foraged cicadas. 

For an estimated two billion people around the planet, eating insects is no big deal. While entrepreneurs, environmentalists, and foragers have made some inroads in convincing Americans that insects can be a healthy, tasty source of protein, the U.S. is “lagging” when it comes to eating arthropods, said Cat Lamb, a sociologist at the University of Kentucky. 

Still, there’s one insect that even the bug-averse are typically intrigued to try, Lamb said: the cicada. 

Lamb, who has a freezer full of frozen insects back home, came to Asheville for this dinner because she’s researching why that is. As guests mingle on a terrace overlooking the Blue Ridge Mountains, Lamb and I speculate over rosé that perhaps the excitement stems from the fact that, unlike an ant or a grasshopper, cicadas emerge in broods at specific intervals, making them seem more special. 

My fellow guests–some in floral dresses, others sporting tattoos and cowboy boots–express a blend of nervousness and excitement. They came out for a variety of reasons, including to support Steiner and Vecinos, which provides free health care to low-income residents of Western North Carolina. Others came out to push the boundaries of their taste buds. 

Esther Reynolds, a recipe editor from Asheville, is pumped. “I’m so ready,” she says. She’s tried crickets with sour cream and onion seasoning before, but “this is leveling up.” 

Her friend Millie Hite, a therapist who’s previously tried grubs and crickets abroad, was equally enthusiastic. “We read about the event and said, ‘Once in a lifetime, we’re there,’” says Hite.

Teresa Kirkland, also a therapist, was more leery but still cautiously optimistic: “I love shrimp, so hopefully they’ll taste like that.” 

“I think it’s good to have a sense of adventure,” she adds. 

These cicadas are part of Brood XIV, a group that emerges once every 17 years. In May, Muskat, who runs a well-known foraging education company, No Taste Like Home, in Asheville, posted on Facebook that he was paying $20 a gallon for foraged cicadas, which he planned to eat himself and share with others as part of his food-finding zeal. Someone commented with an AI-generated picture of a pizza covered in bugs. 

Steiner hatched her fundraising idea after seeing the exchange.

It’s not unheard of for fancy chefs to experiment with challenging or esoteric ingredients: If you’re going to find insects on the menu anywhere in a U.S. city, it’s likely to be at an upscale restaurant. Steiner and Muskat tapped eateries and chefs from the upper echelons, including Asheville Italian staple Luminosa; heirloom corn aficionado and chef Luis Martinez; Hendersonville caterer Friends & Neighbors Dining; and Black Mountain’s Foothills Local Meats. 

Eric Morris, a James Beard-nominated chef at Foothills, says he’s been sourcing “interesting and usually delicious” ingredients from Muskat for eight years. He wanted to support Vecinos, and he couldn’t pass up the opportunity for a challenge. He’d made a garam, or a blend of spices, out of ants that Martinez brought him from Mexico and has cooked with crickets, but never cicadas. 

“The first thing I did was eat one,” he says. The flavor felt like a cross between lion’s mane mushroom and celery. But it had more of a shrimpy texture, leading him to treat the bugs like shellfish and create the tomato bisque that became our third course. 

Before we get there, we’re served a salad from Friends & Neighbors: a bed of tonnato sauce, sliced tomatoes and cucumbers, a shallot-celery vinaigrette, a fried blend of what the chefs call “crispy bits” including quinoa, shallot, garlic, and, on top, chopped chunks of cicada. 

I’m seated with an emergency room nurse, a couple who are passionate about foraging, a woman who works at a community garden, and someone in farming and food security. None of them has eaten cicadas before. 

And while I’ve traveled to countries where insect consumption is common, I’m not really an adventurous eater when it comes to meat (if bugs are considered meat). I know I can’t linger over what’s on my plate, can’t get in my own head about it. I quickly spear a cicada butt with my fork, pop it in my mouth, and chew. 

Reactions start to trickle in from around the table: 

“It just tastes like a crispy little something.” 

“It tastes like whatever they put on it.”

“It works!” 

It does work, to my relief. It has the feel of “crispy bits,” with an undertone of nuts. Taken with the vegetables, it’s quite pleasant. I finish the whole dish. 

The next two courses don’t taste like cicada at all. We’re served a palate cleanser in the form of a summer melon, infused with Navajo tea and finished with sumac-cicada salt and fresh dahlia petals. The salt tastes like Tajín, a Mexican seasoning, and it’s perfect for the August evening. Then comes Morris’ bisque, which he finished with balls of cicada caviar (pureed cicada bodies mixed with agar and flavored with truffle oil). It’s actually delicious. 

Just when I start to think eating bugs is no big deal, things get interesting. Our main course is a rich campanelle and steak. The pasta is topped with whole fried cicadas, and the steak is served with pickled cicadas that are similarly intact. 

For the first time that night, I’m challenged. The sun’s going down, I’m getting full, and I’m being served what are very clearly bugs, not bugs turned into salt or caviar or stock. Once again, I don’t give myself time to think. I pop a fried one, then a pickled one, in my mouth. They have the texture of a soft-shell crab, and they hold the flavor of whatever the chefs put on them well. Still, my stomach’s starting to curdle. I’m getting in my own head. I’m eating bugs. 

The pickled cicadas are proving controversial at my table. Dessert–a rich block of cake, topped with lime curd, fenugreek caramel corn, fresh blackberries, and delicate cicada wings anchored in a cicada and marigold Bavarian cream–also provokes some conflicting takes. “It’s like when you put gelatin on your tongue, and it doesn’t quite dissolve,” one of my tablemates says of the wings. 

Overall, the meal is a hit. Every guest I talked to earlier in the night uses the word “amazing.” “Each one was better than the last,” Reynolds says. 

The folks at my table are pleased, too. “I didn’t think I was going to enjoy the cicadas as much as I did,” says Leonora Stefanile, a community garden manager from Black Mountain. “It wasn’t like, I’m eating a bug. It was, this is a tasty morsel of food.” 

This, I think, is the most important determinant in whether you’ll enjoy bugs or not: Can you get past the ick factor? 

Pretty much everyone seems to agree that the cicadas are good. If you already eat lobster and shrimp, there’s no reason you shouldn’t give these a try. But like so much of food, it’s a mental game. 

Morris says that when he experimented with cicadas in his kitchen in advance of this dinner, half of his employees flat out refused to try the bisque, even though they acknowledged that it looked good. 

And Morris gets that. “It’s intimate; it goes inside your body,” he says. 

But he urges people to be open-minded to eating a cheap, easy, low-footprint source of protein. And there’s no reason Americans’ cultural conceptions around bugs can’t change. 

“A lot of stuff we eat today, we didn’t eat 100 years ago,” Morris says. The flip side is also true: “I have a collection of old cookbooks. Seventy percent of the stuff in there I’m like, ‘No way.’”

On the way home, my stomach feels heavy and sour. That could be because I ate too much, or because I keep thinking about those little legs and wings churning through my digestive tract. I stop at a Sheetz and buy a full-size bag of Skinny Pop to settle things down, which I eat in its entirety while speeding east on Interstate 40. 

I think about what Lamb said about her research, which shows that what people consider gross or not is largely a cultural construct. 

“Even if you eat insects one time,” she said, “you’re more likely to do it in the future. Maybe not everyone here is going to have cricket flour bread next week, but they’re more likely to eat insects again.” 

Now that I’ve done it once, I’d think I’d give it another go.