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Entomophagophobia

Rumour has it we’ll soon be encouraged to eat insects: crickets and mealworms like the birds. My mother used to tell me to wash my hands if I even managed to capture a fly on a lucky grab: you never knew what it had been crawling on, so I suppose I’m being short-sighted and unduly cultural about it. Still, it seems like an unequal trade on many levels: the birds will no doubt switch to eating our crops as their supply of insects declines.

Okay, I grudgingly accept that there are many countries in which undisguised and hopefully immobile insects have found their way into waiting palates, but in the prairies where I grew up, unless you belonged to the la-de-da class, parents camouflaged most of the food they fed us with buns or ketchup -especially in the long, cold winters when it was that or porridge. I mean we had lots of empty prairies for ground beef patty production, and plenty of space left over to grow bread and stuff, so why would we even think of eating bugs, for goodness sakes? Times were different then.

I’m reminded of something that happened to me when I was just a child in 1950ies Winnipeg. I used to hang around with a short, plumpy kid named Jeffrey who, among other eccentricities, had a garter snake as a pet. He apparently kept it in a wire cage in his bedroom.

“They aren’t dangerous,” he used to reassure me, but each time he said it with a glint in his eyes and a funny sort of smile on his face. “I let him out when I get home from school and he immediately slithers under the  bed to hide.”

The idea of anything slithering, let alone hiding under a bed was enough to keep me from visiting his bedroom, invited or not.

“So what do you feed him?” It occurred to me that a hungry snake hiding under his bed might be inclined to hunt anything that wandered nearby.

He always shrugged at the question, as if the answer was obvious. Visions of bits of uneaten hamburgers, or the occasional dropped wiener like I used to feed to my dog who always waited under the table, danced through my head.

“Bugs,” he said with a smile. “I feed him bugs from the garden. I caught a grasshopper a few weeks ago and he seemed to enjoy it…”

“How did…”

“Killed it first, so it wouldn’t hop away,” he answered before I had time to formulate the question properly. He was quiet for a moment as he thought about it. “It gave me an idea…” He glanced at my eyes before he continued. “There must be a lot of meat in the grasshopper… you know, in the hopping muscles…”

I stared at him, scepticism no doubt written on my face. “You didn’t…?”

He nodded vigorously and a mischievous smile crept onto his lips. “It was quite good, actually…” He reconsidered the word. “Well, just okay, maybe… It was a bit crunchy -especially the legs, but so are fish bones if you aren’t careful.”

“But you cook fish first, Jeffrey!” I couldn’t believe he’d actually eaten a raw grasshopper. I mean you weren’t even supposed to eat raw hamburger.

A large smile spread across his face. “That’s why I’m telling you about it, eh?” He squinted his eyes at me as he prepared me for a secret: something he wanted me to help him with. “You’re my best friend, right?” I nodded, not sure where this was going. “Wanna help me cook one, or maybe a few?”

I stepped back to see if he was serious. “How… where…?” Questions kept surfacing in my head.

His face became serious, and he studied my expression for a moment. “We can catch a few grasshoppers and keep them in a box -I’ll tell my parents it’s for the snake- and then we can cook them on Saturday as soon as they go into town.”

I wasn’t sure what to say. “How do you cook grasshoppers, Jeffrey? I mean they’ll hop all over the kitchen…”

He rolled his eyes at my confusion. “We kill a few first, and then put ‘em in the frying pan with a little butter.”

I shook my head. “Won’t they smell up the kitchen? Your parents will figure you’ve been up to something…”

He smiled. “I’ll tell them I thought the snake might like some cooked food; they know he never minded bits of my hamburger.”

When Saturday arrived, killing them was difficult for me, though. I decided not to drown or boil them, because I didn’t want to make them suffer, so I suggested squishing them with the bottom of a drinking glass from the kitchen, while Jeffrey got the big cast iron frying pan ready.

“I watched mom frying the hamburger patties in this,” he explained with his usual shrug, then reached into the box to scoop a few squished grasshoppers out with a spoon, and dumped them unceremoniously into the butter sizzling furiously in the pan. “She usually got it really hot, I think…” I could tell by the expression on his face that he wasn’t sure about how much heat to use though, and I could also sense he was already changing his mind about the whole experiment.

“I think they’re burning, Jeffrey. Maybe the pan’s too hot…” I was remembering the hamburger patties my mother made; they’d never smoked this much.

Something had started to crackle and Jeffrey figured he should add more butter, but it began to smoke -or maybe it was the grasshopper blobs already sticking to the pan. Whatever was smoking was turning black and Jeffrey panicked.

“I think we should either eat them now, or throw them out,” he said with a worried look on his face. “Actually… I think I should save them for the snake, don’t you?”

I nodded vigorously. “Wouldn’t want to wreck the pan.”

He allowed himself a sigh, then shrugged. “I’d get the heck…”

I didn’t mention the nausea I was already feeling; I didn’t want him to think I wasn’t still his best friend… “Wanna come over to my place for lunch? My mom said she’d make us some hotdogs…”

His eyes lit up at the suggestion. “Good idea; then we can ask her if she knows how to fry grasshoppers…”

Jeffrey was definitely a kid ahead of his time.

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