Free Anything That Moves by Dana Goodyear Page A

judges, warning them brightly to “be very careful of the fangs!”
    A young girl with curly hair lunged eagerly at the plate. “If it’s in sushi, I’ll eat it,” she said. When she had tried a piece, she declared, “It’s sushi. With spiders. It’s awesome.”
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    F our-fifths of the animal species on earth are insects, and yet food insects are not particularly easy to find. Home cooks can call Fred Rhyme, of Rainbow Mealworms, who provided the Madagascar hissing cockroaches for
Fear Factor
. He sells more than a billion worms a year; the sign at the edge of his farm, a conglomeration of twenty-three trailers, shotgun houses, and former machine shops in South Los Angeles, says, “Welcome to Worm City, Compton, Cal., 90220½. Population: 990,000,000.” The farm supplies six hundred thousand worms a week to the San Diego Zoo. “It’s mostly animals we feed,” Rhyme’s wife, Betty, who is the company’s president, told me. “The people are something of an oddity.”
    I wasn’t in the market for more mealworms. I had gone to visit Florence Dunkel, the entomologist, in Montana, and eaten plenty of them, fried up in butter, in her kitchen. They smelled of mushrooms and tasted of sunflower seeds. The flavor was unobjectionable, but not reason enough to eat something that reminded me of the time I was halfway through a sleeve of extra-crumbly Ritz crackers before I realized that the crumbs were moving. I wanted to see if bugs could be transcendent, and I knew who would know. “One of the biggest successes of the local New Cocktailian movement is the mezcal-based Donaji at Rivera downtown, which Julian Cox serves in a rocks glass rimmed with toasted-grasshopper salt,” Jonathan Gold wrote to me. I duly went to the restaurant and ordered the Donaji, a $14 cocktail named
after a Zapotec princess. The salt tasted like
Jane’s Krazy Mixed-Up Salt,
crushed Bac-Os, and fish-food flakes; the bartender recommended it as a rub for grilled meat.
    Gold also mentioned that I might try Laurent Quenioux, at Bistro LQ, an old acquaintance of his. Gold’s 2006 review of Quenioux’s wild hare stew—“a soft, gloriously stinky Scottish hare stewed in something approximating the traditional
foie gras
–inflected blood”—was one of the pieces for which he won the Pulitzer. To me, Gold wrote, “He occasionally has
escamoles
, giant ant eggs, on the menu. They’re very seasonal, early spring I think, so you’d have to call.” It was winter. I would have to wait.
    Escamoles
are not actually eggs but immature
Liometopum apiculatum
. A delicacy since Aztec times—they were used as tribute to Moctezuma—they are still a prized ingredient in high-end Mexico City restaurants, where they are known colloquially as Mexican caviar. Exquisitely subtle, palest beigy-pink, knobbly as a seed pearl, they command a market price of around $70 a pound.
    Like humans,
Liometopum apiculatum
ants are opportunists; they will eat anything they can overpower, and, because they do not sting, they tear their prey to shreds. (They are also ranchers, tending flocks of aphids and defending them from lady beetles, in exchange for the aphids’ surplus honeydew.) They burrow under boulders or at the base of trees, and live in colonies of up to fifty thousand members. Traditionally, they were hunted only by experienced
escamoleros
—the irrepressible image is of an ant with a Tejano hat with a lasso—but, according to Julieta Ramos-Elorduy, a biologist who studies food insects at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, their desirability has invited poachers, who overharvest and destroy the nests. The ants, which are most readily available in the state of Hidalgo, are also found in the southwestern United States. High prices have inspired North American foragers to get in on