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Biology professor: Cicadas 'good to eat' (disgusting grub warning)
New low-fat option for McDonald's
Bug-Mac and an order of flies
/Johnny Carson
BLOOMINGTON -- Doug Whitman has a hankering for cicada. He thinks the weird-looking insects -- with bulging red eyes, distinctive buzz and a nutty flavor -- are tasty.
"Mmmmm! Bugs!"
"I resent that, Doc!"
I think he has the nutty part right. These things swarm in West Texas during their intermittent appearances, making the air hideous with their buzzing racket and littering every open space with their shells.
"They are good to eat. You can eat them raw or dry them in the oven with garlic," said Whitman, a professor of biology at Illinois State University. They're "packed full of vitamins," he said.
Now, assuming we did want to eat these ugly things, what use is a food source that only appears every 17 years? Will USDA buy them and keep them in deep-froze for cicada-lean years?
Whitman will get a chance to snack by late May or early June, when a 17-year cycle will bring the cicadas back to Illinois. The emergence will be heaviest in northern Illinois. But cicadas are expected to appear in parts of McLean, Livingston, Logan, DeWitt, Ford and Iroquois counties and all of Woodford and Tazewell counties. Their numbers will vary, but we might see 133,000 to 1œ million per acre, said James Appleby, an entomologist with the Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Sciences at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana.
My daughter used to catch them so she could frighten the neighbor's children with them. She thought it was very funny when they squealed and ran away. Another neighbor child, however, was not afraid of them. He liked to bite their heads off. I think he is on death row now.
Like Whitman, he marvels at the insects. He's also tasted cicada. "I ate one on a dare," Appleby said.
Some buds and I were goofing around off-duty in 'Nam and we went into a local eatery. The old papa-san who ran the place invited us to taste his freshly made stew. It smelled good enough but we recoiled when he told us that it was monkey. He said, "Oh no! Is VC monkey!" It's pretty good as long as a hand doesn't come up in your spoon.
My Lao landlady welcomed me to my new house with a nice bowl of beetle soup. Too crunchy, and too much chili for my taste.
Varieties of cicada can be spotted most any summer. Appleby referred to them as "dog day" cicadas, so named because they typically appear in July or August. Cicada are known for their song, which can be deafening. Appleby said the noise sounds somewhat like "pharaoh." The "singing," done by males to attract females, is created by a kind of membrane drum in the male's midsection. The singing and mating occur after spending years underground, where the insects live by sucking sap from the roots of trees and shrubs. Once above ground, cicadas split their skin, leaving behind a brown shell that stick to trees and other hard surfaces. In their few weeks above ground, the cicadas mate, lay eggs and die.
Like hippies?
Except that they don't eat.
Female cicadas can lay more than 600 eggs, inserting them into tree and shrub stems. The eggs will usually hatch in mid-summer after six to 10 weeks, said U of I Extension horticulture Educator Ron Wolford. The new cicadas dig underground to find roots for feeding. It may all sound very mysterious, but Appleby calls the life cycle a marvel of nature and said the cicadas "are absolutely no danger to people." But the egg-laying can stunt the growth of small trees. "If you're planning a new orchard, you might want to wait until fall to plant," Appleby said.

Don Meyer, McLean County extension director, remembers the last time 17-year cicadas appeared in Central Illinois. He may collect a few this time around. "It's a part of history," he said.

Hungry?
Not anymore.
This simple recipe calls for cicadas, anise, salt, rice wine, mashed garlic, celery and turnip greens.
Turnip greens! That's disgusting!
Boil the cicadas and anise in salted rice wine for five minutes; remove the cicadas. Saute garlic; add water and rice wine to make a paste. Deep-fry the cicadas, then skewer them with bamboo picks.
Pretend they are Turks and you are Vlad the Impaler.
Arrange them on a plate with the turnip greens, celery and garlic paste so the cicadas appear to climb out of a mud pie onto green foliage.
Yummy! Actually, this might be fun at a summer party but I will stick to the barbecue.
Posted by: Atomic Conspiracy 2007-04-03
http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=184796