Entomophagy 101: Five tips for eating insects

With doomsayers predicting impending apocalypse (they really mean it this time), food is probably going to be a lot harder to find by Christmas 2012. And even if the world doesn’t end, for some reason, we’ll probably run out of food by 2050 anyway. Since insects seem to stick around no matter what, the good people at Slate have put together an informative post about how to take up entomophagy like all the cool kids. After the jump, five tips for eating bugs that you should probably commit to memory (since Internet access might get laggy when the four horsemen hit town):

1. Go for the grasshoppers
Crickets, grasshoppers and locusts provide more meaty sustenance than other insects, like mosquitoes. They are also especially suited to grilling (read: cooking over an open fire on a stick).

2. Bright colours = bad taste
Flamboyantly coloured bugs probably get to be conspicuous because they don’t taste very good. Look for crawlies with a drab fashion sense.

3. Don’t fear the venom
Apparently, heat renders venom harmless—so as long as those scorpions are cooked before consumption, there’s not a whole lot to worry about.

4. Watch out for pesticides
Backyard insects can have pesticides on them, so foragers should probably get their bugs from areas with low human activity. Thankfully, by apocalypse time that will be everywhere.

5. Names don’t matter
Pleasant-sounding ladybugs likely taste horrible, while ghastly sounding stinkbugs taste like apples, apparently. When foraging for insects, snobbery is best left at home.