ISSUE 59, CURIOSITIES, Part 1: June Bug Soup
June Bug Soup
If you have participated any length of time in the food world, you’ve probably found yourself in the audience at some lecture when some terribly earnest person proposed the insect as the answer to the global nutrition problem. “It is a ubiquitous source of protein.” Now that “insect apocalypse,” has become the ecological alarm of the moment, maybe the advocates of bug-based nutrition will pause when recommending the grub, locust, and ant answer to the world’s protein deficit. Beans for me, though I find faux meat and impossible burgers laughable.
There was a novelty food moment in the 1950s-60a when chocolate covered ants, honeyed locusts, and crispy crickets were put on the markets as novelty foods. Evelyn Haines, a New York food scout of the mid-1950s, was responsible for the first important introductions to big city markets: chocolate covered ants from South America, French Fried Bumblebees from Burma, Mexican fried worms, and roasted grasshoppers. [Hal Hoyle, “Chocolate Covered Ants Appeal to Food Scout,” Arkansas Democrat (February 23, 1955), 13. I remember their presence in “gourmet shops” in Washington D. C. where sales as “gag gifts” probably accounted for the bulk of business. The various cultures around the world that depend upon insects for food were treated in media with increasing frequency in the course of the latter half of the 20th century/ But Euro-American consumers played with the idea of Man Eating Bugs (to borrow the title of Peter Menzel’s lavishly illustrated 1998 book) as a dimension of the fantasies of being indigenes or denizens of the wild.
Well before the forager fringe began composing The Field Guide to Insects or the protein alarmists were touting insects to feed the Hungry Planet, there were Euro-Americans who preserved odd Insect foodways that came from Old Europe. I found several recipes that preserved the old inland European habit of substituting beetles for crab meat. A 1905 issue of the Charleston Courier for instance printed instructions for making June Bug Soup. Here is the recipe for your delectation: