DON'T SOUND KOSHER:

If you’ve eaten a lobster, crab or crayfish popping a big, juicy locust in your mouth is only a step away (Nick Squires, 1/02/05, Sunday Herald)

As parts of Australia struggle to deal with the worst locust plague in 30 years, a pair of agricultural officers has come up with an unusual solution: if you can’t beat them, eat them.

Edward Joshua and Chris Carr have written a recipe book, Cooking With Sky Prawns, which contains more than 20 suggestions for cooking with locusts, including starters, main courses and desserts. Renaming locusts “sky prawns” will, the authors hope, make the troublesome airborne pests more acceptable to Australians who, unlike some of their Asian neighbours, are traditionally averse to munching on bugs.

Dishes include locust dumplings, chocolate-covered locusts, locust-flavoured pop corn and Coonabarabran stir-fry, named after one of the towns in New South Wales which has been most affected by the current plague. Australia’s largest state is facing the worst locust infestation in a generation, with billions of insects reaching adulthood and taking to the sky.

Parasites and predators which normally keep locust numbers under control have been severely depleted by Australia’s continuing drought.

Farmers are reporting swarms more than 30 miles long and three miles wide darkening the sky. Joshua, an agricultural protection officer, admits that convincing Australians to follow the example of millions of people in Asia and Africa could be an uphill battle. “The looks I get from people when I tell them they should eat insects suggest that locusts don’t have a great future in Australian cuisine,” he said.

“But if you’ve ever eaten a lobster, crab or crayfish you’ve already eaten members of the class arthropoda, of which insects are a part. So popping a big, juicy locust in your mouth is only a step away.”

The 20-page cookbook includes instructions on how to catch locusts, using nets held by hand or fixed to a speeding vehicle. A locust-inspired meal might start with a locust bisque, moving on to sizzling chilli locusts or locust fritters, ending with either locust-rhubarb pie or swarm biscuit crunch which, when properly prepared, should look like “locusts emerging out of a little pile of chunky mud” . Or perhaps popcorn crunch, which entails mixing a cup of dried locusts with popcorn, honey and butter, and baking the mixture in the oven .

“Locusts have a lot of protein and fibre and only six per cent fat compared with beef, which has around 20 per cent fat,” Joshua said. “And there’s a plentiful supply – right now we have gazillions of them hopping and crawling all over the place.

Gotta love the name: Sky Prawns.

Posted by Orrin Judd at January 2, 2005 2:10 PM