Creeping, Crawling Cuisine

In the mood for a meal of sweet and sour silkworm or cream of katydid soup? Have a hankering for Oaxacan Whoppers, a spicy south-of-the-border dish featuring Eastern lubber grasshoppers?

If taking a bite out of a bug is your bag or you’re simply a culinary daredevil, then David George Gordon is your man. The Port Townsend, Wash., resident is the proud author of “The Eat-A-Bug Cookbook,” a humorously written guide to “33 ways to cook grasshoppers, ants, water bugs, spiders, centipedes and their kin.”

Sunday afternoon, Gordon will appear at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County for a lecture and cooking demonstration. First he’ll show off some of his live critters and screen a videotape featuring Venezuelan natives cooking giant tarantulas.

Then the real adventure begins. Gordon, with the help of volunteers from the audience, will prepare one of his arthropod recipes. After that, intrepid attendees and supporters of entomophagy (the fancy term for bug eating) are welcome to sample the exotic cuisine.

The lecture/cooking demo is very much a family-friendly event, Gordon says. Indeed, teens and kids constitute his most enthusiastic and open-minded audience.

“For the most part, kids are not only excited about eating [bugs], but they’re also excited about cooking them,” he says in a phone conversation. “A friend of a friend was required to plan a meal for a high school class. Well, he decided to do it with crickets. Then I was in Denver recently doing a cooking demonstration and I bumped into another teenager who was doing exactly the same thing for his class.”

Youthful mischievousness and teenage rebellion help fuel this interest in bug eating among the 18-and-under crowd, Gordon agrees. “Oh, I’m sure they do it for some of the same reasons I wrote the book, which is to raise eyebrows,” he says with a chuckle.

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Gordon started out writing conventional nature books. He produced guides to orca whales and bald eagles. Another book covered Washington nature preserves and nature conservancy.

However, his readership really grew after he began to tackle more esoteric aspects of the wild kingdom. His publisher initially warned him that his “The Field Guide to the Slug” wouldn’t find an audience. The book is now in its fifth printing.

Gordon’s next work was “The Compleat Cockroach,” which also proved to be one of his bestselling books. That project set the table for “The Eat-A-Bug Cookbook,” released in June. While researching his cockroach book, he discovered a few recipes for cooking these creatures. He also found that arthropod eating is connected to numerous past and present cultures.

The anti-bug-eating bias in the United States and Europe is partly rooted in the perception of insects as pests and crop destroyers, Gordon says. He believes that, if presented in a blindfold test, some bugs might prove quite tasty to American palates.

“If you cook crickets in a wok with a little bit of oil, they have a very mild shrimp-like taste,” he explains. “My all-time favorites are things called wax worms. They are actually caterpillars of moths that live off the wax of the honeycomb of a beehive. It goes back to the you-are-what-you-eat adage. They are very sweet and they have an almost almond-like taste. Scorpions almost taste like a crab.”

Gordon also argues that dining on bugs (which he says are protein rich) is far more environmentally sound than eating cattle, pigs or chickens. He points out that these larger animals generate much more waste and require far more resources to raise.

Still, Gordon’s wife and 11-year-old daughter have found it difficult lending their approval to his latest project. Both are vegetarians, as was Gordon before he started cooking with the likes of crickets and caterpillars.

“My wife and child were somewhat horrified when I announced that this was going to be my next book,” he reveals. Gordon’s intention was to prepare a cookbook that even regular insect eaters would find challenging.

“Sometimes I was trying things that people had told me weren’t going to taste good, like the lubber grasshopper,” he says. ‘Actually, several [entomologists] said, ‘Did you really eat those?’ Well, they’re fine. But it did require some courage.”

Now Gordon is considering a sequel to “The Eat-A-Bug Cookbook.”

“I’ve been getting a lot of input from people saying that I should do another [bug-eating] book,” he states. “They’re disappointed that I didn’t include things like slugs and snails in this book. There are a couple projects I’m considering, and one is ‘More Recipes From the Eat-A-Bug Cafe,’ which is what we were laughingly calling my kitchen during this project.”

BE THERE

David George Gordon will present his lecture and food demonstration Sunday at 2 p.m. in the auditorium at the Natural History Museum of L.A. County, 900 Exposition Blvd. Tickets: Non-museum members, $12; members, $10; students, $8. (213) 763-3534 or https://www.nhm.org.