Challenege for July: Eat a Bug

Visions of the Rewilding Renaissance
#1

Yep. Mmmmm. Tastes like lobster, or does it?

July will hopefully offer up a decent selection of mini-prey. Worms, grasshoppers, crickets, grubs, bees, apparently work if cooked. In western cultures we don’t have too many food taboos, but after wild foods in general, creepy crawlies would definitely count. Lot of humans eat bugs, and indigenous Native American tribes would herd crickets into a pit in a field and cook them.

You can too!

So for July a challenge: catch and eat an edible bug you’ve never eaten before.

A warning: just like wild plants, do your research to make sure it won’t make you sick, and what processing the species requires. Hard to find much information on edible bugs of North America, etc. but the Internet has some.

If the idea terrifies you, just imagine how you felt the first time you ate Jello - looks bad at first, but once you try it, yummmm!

Bon Appetite! And Post here if you will do it!

#2

I will try, if I can find/catch a grasshopper.

#3

The other day i could catch one grasshopper, but while holding it between my fingers something red starting to come out of its mouth. Maybe i was not very gentle catching it? or was it some kind of not-tasty secretion for predators? any idea??
I remember in march, while debarking a big log which was for one year lying on the forest, i found a bunch of small worms. All of them alive, and quite fat. But lacking time and enough information about edible insects, i just left them on the ground. I think this kind of insects living inside of fallen trees could make good food any time of the year.
There must be some website on the internet where a big list is available. Something like the pfaf.org, but for insects. I can’t say i made a wide search, but i still couldnt find anything but small bits.

Another day i was offering oats flakes to some ants nest. They took it up a tree!! Anybody watched this behavior before? The thing is that i tried one of the big warrior ants and it tasted quite acid. Is it their normal taste?

What about snails? Anybody young enough coming grown in the western society would probably make some ugly face when told about eating this kind of animals, but in many regions of Europe (the only experience i have) eating snails has a long tradition. I try to explain the way my mother used to prepare them: It is good to leave them some days just starving, but remember to lock them up in a well closed bucket or they will climb the walls. Once their digestive organs are empty, wash them with water and put them in a bucket with salt. Just normal table salt. This will make them secrete out all this saliva. You need to stir them a lot in the bucket, and wash and more salt. Many times. It is as funny as cleaning guts :wink:
Oh, you stir with your hand, and quite gently to not break the shells. When they dont “spit” anymore, just boil them and make a good sauce. When eat, use something like a toothpick to pull them out, but cut it where it becomes thinner, as this is the digestive organs.
Making some research i found out that snails and slugs use to carry some parasitic worm who attacks (is it the right word?) birds lungs blood vessels and humans brain blood vessels. So better boil them well. Some people even advice to take some care with plants with slugs “tracks”.

i hope somebody finds this usefull.

#4

Fenriswolfr: good luck!
Incomplete: yeah, I’ve had a few ants and they usually taste acid. Pretty good really. Might make a nice table seasoning…“can you pass the ants, please?” Thanks for the info about slugs/snails. A few web resources say they are edible and suggest starving them to clear out digestive stuff like that or feed them something like mint. Don’t remember red stuff, but would probably not eat one that looked sick. Too many others to put on your plate!
I want to try a bee. I hear they taste great. :slight_smile:

#5

ok, so ants are on the list
i think i read somewhere that the abdomen is the most nutritious part of em, but not sure…
I remember one of this videos with Ray Mears (maybe Belarus) he destroyed the top of an ants nest to get the larvae. And some new questions came to me… Is it the nutritious difference between adult ants and larvae so big that its worth to destroy part of the nest? is it a big deal for them to rebuild such destruction and grow more larvae?

Dan, how can you take out the sting before putting it in your mouth? pressing the abdomen??

#6

I haven’t eaten mature ants (will try that next) but so far tried ant egg sacks and what seemed to be ant children (outer shell wasn’t complete but had the shape of an ant). Neither tasted strong. The egg sacks were a little chewy - reminded me of rice. The immature ants were my favorite so far. If I could gather enough of them quickly, they would be good lightly spiced.

Mostly our ants are moundbuilding but those I ate were a type that builds their nest under logs or rocks. The first nest I found was when I accidentally moved a chunk of wood with my foot. They move really fast when the lid is moved from their nest so it would help, when gathering them, to have another person or two.

Anybody ever eat earwigs or japanese beetles?

-j

#7

In Europe this ants living under rocks or logs use to be quite small to be worth the time.
About the earwigs, anybody knows whats the tail for? where i grew the slang name for them was something like “dick-cutters”

#8

I’ve got 2 banana slugs waiting to go on the frying pan. Hear they don’t taste particularly great, but they do have a lot of meat on them bones…or not bones.

#9

Ok here we have two genuine Oregon Coast Banana Slugs, starved for two days to finish their digestion process. Also in the picture, a mixture of daisies, plantain, and something else I don’t recall.

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Here we have slugs roasting on a fire. Didn’t know how long to cook them, so really cooked them good. Starting at brown, they turned red.

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Now, an on-the-fly banana slug salad! Tastes…like…nothing surprisingly. A bit chewy.

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I still have my life a week or so later. Would I eat them again? Sure. Would I bother to cook one if I saw it crawling around a garden again? Nah, probably not, unless I really wanted more food independence, then definitely.

#10

Mountain Sorrel - also had mountain sorrel. It surprised me how bad I felt impaling them them roasting them alive. They had made sounds in their bag for a few days, and bugs or not, felt I wanted to find more humane ways to kill them. Drowning possibly.

So, any challenge ideas for August?

#11

Dan - Thanks for sharing the slug pics. Awesome.

Incomplete - Dick-cutter is a better name than earwig. :slight_smile:

In the past I ate fishflies. They hatch in the millions(probably more) along the Mississippi. Their texture reminds me of a potato chip. Very mild flavor.

I’ve also tried a grub in the past but I didn’t know at the time to “milk” the shit out of it so the aftertaste was pretty strong. :frowning:

I’m not sure what the challenge should be for August. Here are some things I want to do soon (but for some of them I want to wait for cold weather).

make a shelter that I could live in during the winter.
learn how to save sinew during butchering and how to preserve it
tan a hide
make a bowdrill

mentally map my landbase (find caves, safe springs, learn the deer population, figure out easiest ways to get from one place to another) This obviously is not just a month activity. I’m not sure how to make it into a monthly challenge.

One last one - learn how to use more of the animal. I save the heart and liver and am thinking about taking the tounge. Haven’t done anything yet with brains, bones, bladder, intestines, other organs. I have heard that kidney and lung is edible. Might be a monthly challenge hidden in there.

Thanks for doing these Dan. The monthly challenges keep me
working on skills even when I feel like I’m too busy.

#12

No problem :slight_smile:

Mentally mapping one’s landbase sounds awesome. I personally would rather wait a month though as I expect to travel most of this August.

Of the others, making a bowdrill might go well now. Tried it back in the winter, but didn’t get far, and in Summer might go easier. Considering August already started, I’d say let’s go for it.

#13

you can eat most of the animal, including brain, tongue, all the flesh in the face, stomach, intestines (takes long hours to clean them)… you can also make string with the intestines. If anybody is interested, i can post some method i made research on. In the region where i was grown it was kind of traditional to make some music instrument with the urine bladder. oh,…i almost forget: in my mother language we have different words for brains and lungs when they are for eating, than ourselves

it was so much fun when i was kid and my family was making the pig slaughter every winter…