Wow! I had no idea. A very interesting article from one of my favorite sources, Popular Science @ An Infection Turns Swarming Locusts Into Solitary Grasshoppers, Study Finds | Popular Science
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No recipes?
You ask, I provide.
Garlic Butter Fried Grasshoppers
1/4 cup butter
6 cloves garlic, crushed
1 cup cleaned insects*
Melt butter in fry pan. Reduce heat. Sauté garlic in butter for 5 minutes. Add grasshoppers. Continue sautéing for 10 - 15
minutes, stirring occasionally.
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Oaxaca Enchiladas
About 1000 grasshoppers (the younger the better)
1/2 cup chili sauce
pinch of salt
garlic
onion
1 lemon
1 cup guacamole
6 tortillas
Directions: Soak the grasshoppers in clean water for 24 hours. Boil them, then let dry. Fry in a pan with garlic, onion, salt
and lemon. Roll up in tortillas with chili sauce and guacamole. Serves six if you can fund six.
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Some 30 odd years ago I was traveling in Mexico and whilst in a small town I was checking out their town market. I smelled this wonderful concoction of chili and garlic coming from a street vendor selling food from a cart. The line of customers was a dozen deep so I meandered about for a bit to return later. Still a dozen people in line, so I got in line. 50 pesos for a small, and 75 pesos for a large. This guy is throwing something into a pot of hot oil for a few seconds, then scooping it out with a wire spoon letting the oil drain off and throwing it into a paper cup and sprinkling something on it. It must be a chili oil because it smells heavenly. Finally, I am the customer, and I order a small. What the heck, that looked like bugs he just tossed into the oil. Yep, deep fried grasshoppers in chili oil and then sprinkled with fresh minced garlic. It tasted as good as it smelled.
The species that used to swarm across the US Great Plains, the Rocky Mountain Locust (a bad name, since it lived in the prairies), went from "vast hordes that darken the sky" to "extinct" over a couple decades. The guess as to why is that plowing the fields destroyed the eggs in the periods between swarms, leaving not enough to swarm, and that swarming was necessary for reproduction.
Wow! I had no idea. A very interesting article from one of my favorite sources, Popular Science @ An Infection Turns Swarming Locusts Into Solitary Grasshoppers, Study Finds | Popular Science