Free Anything That Moves by Dana Goodyear

sandwich she was going to enter in the competition. But, finding them irresistible, she fried up a few to snack on. “It tastes like bacon,” she said rapturously. “I’m going to eat the whole plate unless someone gets in there.” I did: the drones, dripping in butter and lightly coated with honey from their cells, were fatty and a little bit sweet, and, like everything chitinous, left me with a disturbing aftertaste of dried shrimp.
    Gracer opened the freezer and inspected his bugs: housefly pupae, cicadas, and, his favorite, ninety-dollar-a-pound katydids from Uganda. “They’re very rich, almost buttery,” he said. “They almost taste as if they’ve gone around the bend.”
    â€œDave, where’s the tailless whip scorpion?” Martin said, and Gracer produced an elegantly armored black creature with a foreleg like a calligraphy flourish. “I’m thinking about doing a tempura type of fry and a spicy mayonnaise,” Martin, who also worked for a number of years in a Japanese restaurant, said. First, she flash-fried it to soften the exoskeleton, and then she dipped it in tempura batter. To her knowledge, no one had ever before eaten a tailless whip scorpion. “All right, people, let’s make history,” she said, using a pair of chopsticks to lower it back into the pan, where it sizzled violently. I decided right there on a new policy, one I thought would pass muster with Gold: I will eat disgusting things, but only those with long established culinary traditions.
    When the scorpion was finished, she put it on a plate, and she and Gracer sat down on a couch to feast on what looked like far too much bug for me, and yet not nearly enough to satisfy hunger. Gracer pulled off a pincer. “There’s something—that white stuff—that’s meat!” he cried, pointing to a speck of flesh. “That’s meat!” Martin repeated excitedly, and exhorted him to try it. He tasted; she tasted. “Fish,” Gracer said. “It has the consistency of fish.” Martin split a leg apart and nibbled. In a few bites, they had eaten all there was. “That was really good,” she said.
    The following morning, in a tent on the front lawn of the Natural History Museum, Gracer faced Zack (the Cajun Bug Chef) Lemann, an established bug-cooker from New Orleans, who dazzled the judges—most of them children—with his “odonate hors d’oeuvres,” fried wild-caught dragonflies served on sautéed mushrooms with Dijon-soy butter. Children are often seen as the great hope of entomophagy, because of their openness to new foods, but even they are not without prejudices. Gracer, who presented stinkbug-and-kale salad, had neglected to account for the fact that kids don’t like kale.
    A five-year-old approached Lemann afterward. “Excuse me, can I eat a dragonfly?” he said. Lemann cooked one for him. The boy picked the batter off, revealing a wing as elaborately paned as a cathedral window, and then bit into it: his first bug. His little brother, who was three, came over and asked for a bite. “Good,” he pronounced.
    â€œWho’s going to eat the head?” their mother asked.
    â€œI will,” the five-year-old said. “Once somebody licks the mustard off.”
    The last round of the day matched Martin against Gracer. He was making Ugandan-katydid-and-grilled-cheese sandwiches. Drawing on her Japanese-restaurant experience, Martin decided to make a spider roll, using a rose-haired tarantula bought from a pet store. She held up the spider and burned off its hair with a lighter, and then removed its abdomen. “The problem with eating an actual spider roll, made with crab, is that they’re bottom feeders,” she said. “This spider probably ate only crickets, which ate only grass.” She whipped up a sauce and added a few slices of cucumber, and then presented her dish to the