You've got to "dry up the squish" and other notes from the world of cicada-eating

Writer Haley Weiss learned this lesson firsthand by taking a trip to a Maryland event called Cicadafest that offered a wide array of cicada tasting options, from air-fried and grilled to roasted and chocolate-covered. It shouldn’t be much of a surprise that, as Weiss puts it, “cooking technique is everything.”

She writes that an air-fried cicada, seasoned with Old Bay, is pretty good, comparing it to “a piece of earthy popcorn” that’s “almost reminiscent of a roasted chickpea.” (Except for the tiny bug leg left in her mouth.) The chocolate-covered “felt like cheating” since its coating covered up the cicada’s taste. Grilled ones have “a slightly meatier flavor” not unlike shrimp, but the oven-roasted ones “hadn’t been blasted with enough heat to properly dry up the squish,” which meant that Weiss’ sample “exploded in my mouth like a Gusher” of “bug guts.”

“The crunchier the better,” Weiss writes in summary. She ends the piece by addressing the arguments for eating bugs instead of traditionally farmed meat, explaining that there might still be better, equally humane and environmentally friendly options on the table, and admitting that “the joy within those exoskeletons is limited, no matter how much Old Bay is sprinkled on top.”

For more delicious bug-eating descriptions, read the entire article here.

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