Angelina Bautista Antonio and her daughters get up at 4 a.m. to hunt. Armed with plastic bowls and bags, the family from Santa Lucia Ocotlan scour the fields in
search of their prey · things that crawl, hop, fly and generally make for a crispy treat.
Grasshoppers, ant and fly larvae, worms and assorted other creepy crawlies have been a staple for thousands of years and remain an important source of food for poor Mexicans.
After making the leap from alfalfa field to kitchen, the insects' next step could be onto the plates of astronauts. "You can't take cows out to space, but you can carry colonies of insects,''
said Julieta Ramos Elorduy, an insect specialist at Mexico City's UNAM university and author of several cook books involving insect recipes: "There are 3,687 species in the world of edible
insects, and 400 in Mexico.
They're extremely nutritional because most of their bodies are made up of proteins. They could be the foodstuff for long space journeys,'' she added. A space ship could have buckets full of worms
multiplying as astronauts blast out to the stars.
In Mexico, insects are boiled in lemon, sprinkled with chili or fried in olive oil to make ant egg tacos or bug pâté. Sprinkle some ground nuts and seasoning over a plate of pasta and voila:
spaghetti al la gusano amarillo (yellow worms).
For Bautista Antonio, going to market in Oaxaca with a large basket of chili-flavored grasshoppers balanced on her head, the space-age possibilities of insect cuisine are of little relevance. On a
good day she can make 800 pesos ($ 86), a fortune in rural Mexico, and she is quite happy to sell to locals and the occasional curious tourist. "It used to be that only Mexicans would buy. Now
tourists are also interested, especially Italians,'' she said.
Eating insects is far from uncommon. In Mexico insect platters are regularly on the menu of poor countryside dwellers. In cities such as Mexico City, insects have become haute cuisine, with
restaurants specialising in so-called pre-Hispanic foods charging high prices.
In Washington, the "Insect Club'' caters to the more delicate palates of North Americans, while Asians, Africans and the aborigines of Australia do not think twice about popping crackly critters down
their gullets. Bees, wasps, ants, worms and grasshoppers top the popularity polls in Mexico. The thick, juicy worm that inhabits the Maguey cactus, often put in bottles of the fiery Mezcal spirit to
give it that extra bit of bite, is a valued delicacy and is also cherished in Asia as a powerful aphrodisiac.
Since Aztec times 500 years ago, fly larvae, or "ahuautle,'' has been known as the Mexican caviar. From February to April, ant egg hunters cover themselves up and dig down into the nests of ant
colonies, searching for the precious larvae known in Mexico as "escamoles''.
In the village of Teteapulco in central Hidalgo state, Eufrosina Dias Rios brushed a writhing layer of ants off her husband Juan Aguilar Rodriguez's back as he reached into an ant hole to find his
lunch. "This stuff is really good for energy. Around here we all eat escamoles,'' Aguilar Rodriguez said as enraged ants sprinted all over his body and tried desperately to rescue some of the
larvae from the pile he had poured onto a cactus leaf.
Ramos Elorduy, author of "Creepy Crawly Cuisine,'' among others, said insects could become an increasingly important source of food for the world as populations grow and people run out of land for
corn fields and cattle: "Insects already play a big role (in nutrition) but their importance will grow, not just because of shortages of other foods. It will be because of their resistance and
because they eat everything,'' she said.
The resistance she mentions is perhaps the biggest problem these days with eating insects. They have gradually become immune to many insecticides but the toxins build up in their bodies and will
enter the metabolism of anyone who eats them.
That is why Miriam Cortez, a chemical engineer at the Oaxaca Technical Institute, is launching a programme to ensure consumers can get grasshoppers with no unsavory ingredients. Under the brand name
"Uxharu,'' the old Zapotec Indian word for grasshoppers, Cortez is bagging and bottling crickets caught in areas where farmers do not use insecticides.
"We are trying to bring some standardisation into the sales process,'' she said, adding that the idea was to offer a product that would not harm peoples' health.
Cortez's dream is to export packaged grasshoppers to the United States, where up to 20 million immigrant Mexicans live. She reckons they might prefer to chew on a few grasshoppers to eating a bag of
potato chips at snack time. There is only one problem. Their legs tend to get stuck between your teeth.
Freitag, 08. Oktober 1999