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WaPo touts insect eating as ‘a sustainable protein source’ – ‘Can you eat cicadas? Yes, & here’s the best way to catch, cook and snack on them’

https://www.washingtonpost.com/food/2021/05/05/cicadas-cooking-recipes/

Washington Post:

The first time Weiss saw periodical cicadas was in 2004. As a self-proclaimed “science mom,” she was excited to encounter them with her two young daughters.

“I let them stay up until midnight so that we could go outside and pluck cicadas from their nymphal cases as they emerged,” she says. She served them up, dipped in chocolate, to her daughters’ classmates — to mixed reactions of intrigue, awe and disgust. “My older daughter is 23 now, and I still run into her classmates who say, ‘I remember that you gave me a bug to eat when I was in second grade.’”

As a chef and executive director of Brooklyn Bugs, whose mission is to promote insects as a sustainable protein source, Joseph Yoon plans to try them at every point in their life cycle, drawing on nose-to-tail ideas of cooking.

“There’s so much beauty in the unknown,” he says. “I plan on just exhausting all the possibilities.”

Yoon will work with entomologists and other specialists on this venture, which he says “will help further our understanding of the functionality and manners in which we can incorporate insect protein into our diet.”

The first time Weiss saw periodical cicadas was in 2004. As a self-proclaimed “science mom,” she was excited to encounter them with her two young daughters.

“I let them stay up until midnight so that we could go outside and pluck cicadas from their nymphal cases as they emerged,” she says. She served them up, dipped in chocolate, to her daughters’ classmates — to mixed reactions of intrigue, awe and disgust. “My older daughter is 23 now, and I still run into her classmates who say, ‘I remember that you gave me a bug to eat when I was in second grade.’”

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