Weird food extra

Better cooked? Here's our tips for coping with the indescribable (well, to some!)

Sophie Anderton managed to get through her beetle pupae, witchetty grubs and mangrove worms, but Natalie Appleton choked on the live green ants and the fish eye. How would the I'm a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here contestants cope with the delights we served up in this month's issue of Flipside?

Feeling peckish? [Picture credit: Science Photo Library]

How to cook with insects

* Dead insects deteriorate rapidly (more quickly than meat) and so need to be eaten alive, eaten quickly once dead, or kept alive until it's time for cooking.
* Anything that hops needs to be refrigerated or frozen before starting, otherwise you'll never get it to stay in the frying pan. Grasshoppers taste better if you gut them first.
* When eating live ants, chew with mouth closed: they'll be out and on your face in no time.
* Although you can eat insects alive, it's worth cooking them to kill off the parasites they may be carrying.
* Clean your insects, spread them on a baking sheet and bake at 200º (degrees celsius) (gas mark 6) for one to two hours. Once cool, crush and use in any recipe that uses nuts - biscuits, cakes, puddings, bread, nut loaf etc.
* When cooking moths, dragonfly or winged ants, burn off the inedible wings and legs by roasting in hot ashes or grilling.

Bug by-products
We use the leather from cows but is there anything left over from an ant roast?

One of the downsides to eating bugs is the chitin, the carbohydrate polymer contained in an insect's exoskeleton (its hard body shell). This makes up 10 per cent of a dried insect, but is hard to digest and lowers the quality of protein that bugs can deliver (if deep fried and eaten whole, for example). However, chitin is a bit of a star performer, being both tough and biodegradable, with anti-fungal and anti-bacterial properties. It can be used as a suture, to sew up patients after surgery, as a dressing to heal wounds and burns, in farming, to protect plants from disease, in cosmetics, as a non-allergenic preservative, and in the food industry as a supplement to provide fibre and calcium - the Japanese use it in cereals - and as a natural thickening agent. Chitin is also found in the shells of lobsters, crabs and crayfish, and its derivative, chitosan, is big news in the world of slimming. An insoluble, non-digestible fibre, it is supposed to "attract" fat (by creating, through polymerisation, long chains of fat and fibre molecules) and remove it from the body. In reality, this means making big lumps of fat which the body can't digest, and pushes out the only way it knows how. You work it out!

If the mass-production of bugs for food were ever to take off - let's face it, most of the world's populations already chomp away happily, so what's holding the rest of us back? - the waste chitin could be harvested and used commercially. Yet more uses would be discovered, and we might find in the future that a bug's life changes ours beyond recognition.

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