Would You Eat Bugs?

It’s a sunny spring day, and your class is having a picnic. You brought potato salad. Edwin unwraps turkey sandwiches. Suzie passes around crispy snacks with a chili-lime flavor. 

Are they chips? Crackers? Pretzel sticks? Nope, nope, nope. They’re fried grasshoppers!

Would you try these crunchy critters?

Before you say anything, think about this: Humans have been eating insects for thousands of years. And they still do! More than 2,000 types of bugs are safe to eat. People snack on ant eggs in Mexico and fried crickets in Thailand. Insects like these grow fast. So there are plenty of them to cook.

Plus, bugs are good for you! They have important nutrients, like protein and calcium. These nutrients help you stay healthy. Insects can be yummy too. Some taste like almonds or apples!

Best of all, eating bugs is better for the environment than eating meat from cows or chickens. Raising these animals uses a lot of food, water, and land. Insects don’t need as many of these resources. So eating them can help the planet!

If insects are so great, why don’t more Americans eat them? One reason is that we have learned to stay away from bugs. Bees can sting. Mosquitoes can spread diseases. Fear keeps us from eating things that might hurt us.

Plus, not many companies sell bugs to eat. So food made from insects is pricey. A bag of cricket chips costs up to ten times more than the same amount of ground beef.

And while many bugs are safe to eat, not all of them are. Some bugs could make us sick. There’s a lot we still don’t know about cooking these wriggly creatures safely. 

So you may not see a bowl of bugs in your lunchroom this year. But this could change. When sushi was first served in the U.S., many Americans didn’t want to eat raw fish. Now there are thousands of sushi restaurants across the country. 

Maybe one day you’ll see chocolate-covered ants on the menu at your school’s cafeteria. Would you try them?