Night of the Living Crickets
by
Spencer Pate
It is not an average day
when a box with five hundred live crickets arrives at your
doorstep. Even stranger would be a day when you are not
only very excited about receiving a box of crickets, but a day
when you are planning to bake one hundred chocolate-chip cookies
with the crickets in them. But since I do not live an
average life, all of this did indeed happen to me one frosty
December day in eighth grade. Perhaps I should explain . .
.
I had ordered five hundred,
one-half inch crickets for my science fair project that year.
The purpose of my experiment was to instill people with an open
mind toward entomophagy, or the eating of insects. In case you
didn’t know, insects are an excellent source of protein and are
eaten regularly in many other countries. To accomplish this
goal, I had to make regular chocolate-chip cookies and
“chocolate-chip chirpie (cricket) cookies” which people would
sample and rate on a taste scale. I hypothesized that
seventy-five percent or greater of people will rate a
chocolate-chip cookie baked with crickets within a margin of
three points on a ten point scale of taste as compared to a
regular chocolate-chip cookie. I have long been interested in
eating strange foods, and I even own a book with recipes
involving insects. So I thought: Why not? It will certainly
get me points for creativity. My mom deserves a lot of
credit for letting me do the experiment in the first place,
since I doubt that many other mothers would be brave (or
foolish) enough to allow it.
It was way below freezing the day
the box came; ironically, the box proclaimed in bold letters:
“Live Crickets. Keep Warm.” As soon as I got the box, I put it
in the refrigerator until my dad got home so that he could help
me with the baking process. When we opened the box, we had no
idea of what lay ahead of us. We had expected the crickets to
arrive in a smaller box within the package, but the crickets
were right there in open egg cartons with a rotten potato and a
heat pack that had gone cold. As soon as the crickets were
exposed to room temperature air, they started to jump around. I
had instructions that I found on the internet that told how to
dry roast crickets, but I really had no idea what to do with the
crickets in the meantime when they were threatening to jump out
of the box and take up residence in the kitchen.
As quickly as I could, I
transferred the crickets to a lidded colander and shoved them in
the freezer for fifteen minutes to slow down their metabolism.
After that time was up, the crickets were rinsed to purge them
of any dirt or nasty bits that might be left. The crickets had
to be rigorously cleaned, or they might not be fit for human
consumption. However, the rinsing only made the crickets
friskier. Sticking the crickets in the freezer again only
slowed them down a little; when I opened the colander, a few
brave individuals tried to escape by jumping into the sink and
onto the stove. By the way, seeing a mass of five hundred
crickets squirming in a colander is not a pretty sight. My dad
helped me throw the crickets on a cookie sheet and put them back
in the freezer for fifteen more minutes. Luckily, after this
time the crickets were frozen to the cookie sheet, and we could
proceed with the dry roasting. I had expected this process to
take only a few minutes, but it ended up taking forty-five
minutes or until the crickets could be crushed with a spoon.
Finally, the “undead” crickets were dead.
I was up until midnight that
night baking cricket cookies and normal chocolate-chip cookies,
but the stars aligned in my favor and the next day was a snow
day, so I could sleep in. On the following day, I took some of
the cookies to school while my dad took some to his work.
Volunteers couldn’t participate if they had allergies to shrimp,
shellfish, dust, or chocolate, but there were a surprising
amount of people who were willing to try the cookies. It was
hilarious seeing people’s reactions to eating the cricket
cookies—the crickets were very visible in and on top of the
cookie, with about 5 crickets per cookie. Some people, like my
grandma, were resolute in not sampling the cookies. Others
rather liked the cricket cookie, saying that it tasted rather
nutty, but you could tell that some students were doing it only
for the extra credit that my teacher gave them for
participating. My school principal even got into the act. He
commented that it was a rather surreal day when his first task
of the morning had been to help a student remove her tongue from
the frozen flagpole and now he was being asked to sample a
cookie with crickets in it! He was a good sport, though, and I
even took a funny picture of him as he looked somewhat
nauseated.
The experiment was a topic of
conversation at school and my dad’s workplace, so I got to enjoy
the publicity and notoriety for days. When I went to the
science fair, I had two judges who were actually interested in
my experiment and enjoyed my presentation on entomophagy. I
ended up receiving first place in the category of Behavioral and
Social Sciences and a forty-five dollar check from the Rotary
Club. My science fair project in tenth grade was similar but
had more of a focus on psychology; I made cookies with whole
mealworms in them and cookies with the same number of ground up
mealworms in them and had people rate them on a taste scale.
The catch was that I didn’t tell people that the latter cookies
even contained mealworms. But this experiment was dull compared
to my project in eighth grade, since the mealworms weren’t as
big or as visible as the crickets and didn’t put up a fight.
Nevertheless, I doubt that I will ever forget “the night of the
living crickets,” and to this day there are people that I don’t
even know who come up to me and say that they participated in
the experiment. The title of my project sums it up best:
“Crickets - They’re Not Just for Fishing Anymore!”
Author’s Note: We never used that
colander again.
