Thursday September 2

Coming Soon: Insects In Space?

By Manuel Carrillo

Armed with plastic bowls and bags, the family from Santa Lucia Ocotlan, in the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca, scour the fields in search of their prey -- things that crawl, hop, fly and generally make for a crispy treat.

Grasshoppers, ant and fly larvae, worms and assorted other creepy crawlies have been a staple for thousands of years and remain an important source of food for poor Mexicans like those in this town 22 miles south of state capital Oaxaca.

After making the leap from alfalfa field to kitchen, the insects' next step could be onto the plates of astronauts.

``You can't take cows out to space, but you can carry colonies of insects,'' said Julieta Ramos Elorduy, an insect specialist at Mexico City's UNAM university and author of several cook books involving insect recipes.

``There are 3,687 species in the world of edible insects, and 400 in Mexico. They're extremely nutritional because most of their bodies are made up of proteins. They could be the foodstuff for long space journeys,'' she added.

WORMS IN SPACE

In Mexico, insects are boiled in lemon, sprinkled with chili or fried in olive oil to make ant egg tacos or bug pate. Sprinkle some ground nuts and seasoning over a plate of pasta and voila!: spaghetti al la gusano amarillo (yellow worms).

For Bautista Antonio, going to market in Oaxaca with a large basket of chili-flavored grasshoppers balanced on her head, the space-age possibilities of insect cuisine are of little relevance. On a good day she can make 800 pesos ($86), a fortune in rural Mexico, and she is quite happy to sell to locals and the occasional curious tourist.

``It used to be that only Mexicans would buy. Now tourists are also interested, especially Italians,'' she told Reuters Television.

Eating insects is far from uncommon. In Mexico insect platters are regularly on the menu of poor countryside dwellers. In cities such as Mexico City, insects have become haute cuisine, with restaurants specializing in so-called pre-Hispanic foods charging high prices.

In Washington, the ``Insect Club'' caters to the more delicate palates of North Americans, while Asians, Africans and the aborigines of Australia do not think twice about popping crackly critters down their gullets.

Bees, wasps, ants, worms and grasshoppers top the popularity polls in Mexico. The thick, juicy worm that inhabits the Maguey cactus, often put in bottles of the fiery Mezcal spirit to give it that extra bit of bite, is a valued delicacy and is also cherished in Asia as a powerful aphrodisiac.

Since Aztec times 500 years ago, fly larvae, or ''ahuautle,'' has been known as the Mexican caviar.

From February to April, ant egg hunters cover themselves up and dig down into the nests of ant colonies, searching for the precious larvae known in Mexico as ``escamoles.''

In the village of Teteapulco in central Hidalgo state, Eufrosina Dias Rios brushed a writhing layer of ants off her husband Juan Aguilar Rodriguez's back as he reached into an ant hole to find his lunch.

``This stuff is really good for energy. Around here we all eat escamoles,'' Aguilar Rodriguez said as enraged ants sprinted all over his body and tried desperately to rescue some of the larvae from the pile he had poured onto a cactus leaf.

INSECTS TO RULE OUR KITCHENS

Ramos Elorduy, author of ``Creepy Crawly Cuisine,'' among others, said insects could become an increasingly important source of food for the world as populations grow and people run out of land for corn fields and cattle.

``Insects already play a big role (in nutrition) but their importance will grow, not just because of shortages of other foods. It will be because of their resistance and because they eat everything,'' she said.

The resistance she mentions is perhaps the biggest problem these days with eating insects. They have gradually become immune to many insecticides but the toxins build up in their bodies and will enter the metabolism of anyone who eats them.

That is why Miriam Cortez, a chemical engineer at the Oaxaca Technical Institute, is launching a program to ensure consumers can get grasshoppers with no unsavory ingredients. Under the brand name ``Uxharu,'' the old Zapotec Indian word for grasshoppers, Cortez is bagging and bottling crickets caught in areas where farmers do not use insecticides.

``We are trying to bring some standardization into the sales process,'' she said, adding that the idea was to offer a product that would not harm peoples' health.

Cortez's dream is to export packaged grasshoppers to the United States, where up to 20 million immigrant Mexicans live. She reckons they might prefer to chew on a few grasshoppers to eating a bag of potato chips at snack time.

There is only one problem with crickets. Their legs tend to get stuck between your teeth. The kids actually eat them.