The Urban Pantheist

I was checking on some pest issues in the Butterfly Exhibit when a keeper told me that the Zoo Teens had found a large insect and saved it for me to look at. It turned out to be a dogday cicada, which emerged after spending 3 years as a flightless larva in the soil, sucking on the roots of trees.

I picked up the cicada (which was toward the end of its life and acting quite sluggish) which attracted the attention of some young guests. Some of the kids were really interested, some were horrified. Adults reacted with mild disgust. Keep in mind that all of these people were in an exhibit where the goal was to see large insects. Most of them spent their time in the exhibit trying to coax these large insects to land on them. And yet this cicada--as large, colorful, and harmless as the butterflies--was met with revulsion. Sometimes people are really weird.

There's a lot of talk about eating cicadas on the internet these days--probably I'm encountering it through my own self-filtering. Brood II, in case your own self-filtering has insulated you from this knowledge, is one of the 17 year cicada events on the east coast. From North Carolina to southern Connecticut there will be millions upon millions of large red-eyed insects emerging from their prime number slumber to ascend trees and emit their decibel-shattering love call.

I've only ever experienced annual cicadas--green, "dog day" cicadas which are loud and briefly plentiful, but nothing like these periodical events. I'm eager to travel to the action, perhaps to New Haven, a city I've never visited but that everyone assumes I'm from when I say I grew up in Connecticut.

There seems to be a certain amount of anxiety about this cicada event, fear driven by...I don't know what exactly. The way that cicadas look? The fact that there will suddenly be thousands around, making encounters between humans and these insects more likely? A friend posted a photo of a display of insecticides from (presumably) a hardware store, prominently advertising the fact that the products would kill cicadas. This is the worst kind of fear-pandering, since killing these animals does exactly nothing to control the "problem" of 17 year cicadas. They are active for a short period during one summer, mate and lay eggs, and then disappear again for the length of time that it takes a human to become an adult. So it may appear that by spraying whatever poison around you have made them go away, but they will go away with or without your participation.

The entomophagy community is using the UN recommendations and the Brood II emergence as a synergistic opportunity to promote bug-eating. Supposedly a southern Connecticut sushi restaurant is preparing to (or joking about) make cicada sushi. I'll take the tempura, please--uncooked invertebrates are likely to harbor parasites. This NatGeo Article helpfully adds "[their] plant-based diet gives them a green, asparagus-like flavor."

Of course most Westerners are not among the 2 billion people of the world who already include insects as part of their diet. There's a taboo on this class of arthropod, a disgust borne purely from cultural bias. My favorite recent analysis comes from (of course) a comedian, Andy Zaltzman, on The Bugle Podcast:

"There's no way I'm prepared to eat insects. Mashed up connective tissue of pigs? Yeah, yeah, I'm happy with that. The livers of birds that basically amount to aerial vermin? Yeah! The hacked to pieces corpse of a mechanically slaughtered baby cow? Absolutely! Insects? Never! Unless they're basically insects that live in the sea, in which case, OH YEAH give me a bit of mayonnaise and let me rip its head off! And eat it whole, stomach included, in one go--I don't care if it's dead eyes are staring at me, and if it was waving at me from a bucket ten minutes ago--YUM."