The usual reaction to seeing a hairy tarantula spider isn’t wondering what it tastes like.
David George Gordon wants to change all that.
Gordon appears on the new six-part Smithsonian web series “Bug Bites,” premiering Monday on smithsonianchannel.com/bugbites. The series highlights the worldwide art of cooking and consuming insects.
“We have such bad attitudes about insects that we don’t even consider them as food,” says Gordon, 68. “Eighty percent of the world’s cultures eats bugs — we’re actually the oddballs.”
The Seattle native and self-proclaimed “bug chef” has written several books on the subject, including “The Eat-A-Bug Cookbook,” first published in 1998.
“Bug Bites” features Gordon performing cooking demonstrations, including dishes such as “Tarantula Tempura” and “Waxworm Stir Fry.”
The series also features Joseph Yoon (founder of New York-based catering company Yummy Eats and 2017’s “Brooklyn Bugs” event), Omar Rodriguez (head chef at DC restaurant Oyamel — who’s served grasshopper tacos at his eatery) and Megan Miller (San Francisco-based co-founder of Bitty Foods, a startup seeking to improve the global food system).
So why, Gordon is asked, should anyone eat bugs aside from his reasoning that other cultures do it?
“For one thing, bugs are literally superfoods,” he says. “They’re rich in vitamins and minerals; crickets are full of calcium, for example. Termites have lots of zinc in them. So you can get all your nutritional needs that way.
“The other thing is, they’re much more environmentally friendly,” he says. “When you look at how much it takes to raise a cow for beef or a pig — it takes like 16 pounds of grain to get 1 pound of steak. With crickets, it would take about a pound and a half of grain to get a pound of protein. I’ll save 14 and a half pounds. That’s a lot. The other thing is the water resources. It’s obscene how much goes into raising cattle.”
Gordon has always been a hobbyist chef, but he didn’t focus on insects until he was in his 40s. Prior to that, he was a writer focusing on scientific subjects. In 1996, he wrote a book called “The Complete Cockroach: A Comprehensive Guide to the Most Despised (And Least Understood) Creature on Earth.”
“I had a little section [in the book] on raising [cockroaches] as food and for medicine,” he says. “And that’s what turned me onto the fact that there are all these scientific reports out there that talked about other cultures [eating bugs].”
He still uses science journals as a source of inspiration for many of his recipes. For one recipe involving cooking dragonflies in curried coconut, he says he read a scientific journal about how this is done in Indonesia.
There’s still a general cultural stigma about eating bugs in America — but Gordon says he’s seen attitudes starting to change.
“I was on Conan O’Brien’s [‘Late Night’] show when it was still in New York, when the [‘Eat-A-Bug Cookbook’] was new,” he says. “He was very resistant to the idea of eating this stuff. More recently I was on ‘The Late Late Show with James Corden,’ and because people’s attitudes are changing, thank heavens, everybody ate the bugs — even the band members.”