Best Food Writing 2014

by Holly Hughes

  LEARNING HOW TO TASTE

  By Daniella Martin

  From Edible: An Adventure into the World of Eating Insects and the Last Great Hope to Save the Planet

  Entomophagist is a fancy word for what Daniella Martin is: someone who eats insects. In this book, as well as her online cooking and travel show, Girl Meets Bug, she spreads the gospel of this ancient practice, the ultimate sustainable food source. Turns out she’s not the only insectivore out there. . . .

  There are nearly nineteen hundred recorded edible insect species on Earth and counting. How many different types of meat have you sampled in your lifetime? Most people never go beyond the standard dozen-plus basics of chicken, beef, pork, lamb, and maybe five to ten kinds of fish. Compared with the 500 varieties of insect eaten in Mexico alone, this is a fairly limited flavor palate—the “beginner box” of culinary Crayolas.

  Insects represent the majority of the animal biomass on Earth. They have thousands of different habitats, and many species have evolved to eat a single type of plant. Considering all the different plants and ecosystems there are, and their corresponding insect populations, this opens up a kaleidoscope of flavors.

  In general, insects tend to taste a bit nutty, especially when roasted. This comes from the natural fats they contain, combined with the crunchiness of their mineral-rich exoskeletons. Crickets, for instance, taste like nutty shrimp, whereas most larvae I’ve tried have a nutty mushroom flavor. My two favorites, wax moth caterpillars (a.k.a. wax worms) and bee larvae, taste like enoki-pine nut and bacon-chanterelle, respectively.

  Recently, when I served this grub at the LA Natural History Museum’s Bug Fair Cook-Off,* one kid on the judging panel said my “Alice in Wonderland” dish of sautéed wax worms and oyster mushrooms tasted like macaroni and cheese, while the rest agreed that my Bee-LT Sandwich tasted like it was made with real bacon.

  The term “bug” has a specific taxonomic meaning, indicating an insect of the order Hemiptera, known as the “true bugs,” and includes cicadas, aphids, plant hoppers, leafhoppers, shield bugs, and others. It is also widely used by non-entomologists as an umbrella term covering land arthropods in general, including arachnids like scorpions and spiders.

  Having established that arachnids are included in our general discussion of entomophagy, their tastes should be included as well. In my experience, arachnids often taste like a light, earthy version of shellfish, crab, and lobster in particular. This makes sense since, from a biological standpoint, bugs and crustaceans are quite closely related. However, the air-breathing group of these invertebrates has one distinct advantage over its sea-steeped brethren: They aren’t bottom-feeders. Scorpions, tarantulas, and other edible arachnids all catch their prey live, unlike crabs, which are just as happy to feast on detritus.

  These examples are fairly tame and recognizable; most people can swallow the idea of nutty mushrooms and earthy shellfish. But there are also flavors in the bug world that can hardly be equated with anything familiar to most Westerners. The taste of giant water bug practically defies description; as one writer enthused after his first time eating them, “There is simply nothing in the annals of our culture to which I can direct your attention that would hint at the nature of [its] flavor.”

  When fresh, these aggressive beetles have a scent like a crisp green apple. Large enough to yield tiny fillets, they taste like anchovies soaked in banana-rose brine, with the consistency of a light, flaky fish. Dave Gracer likes to serve tiny filaments of their flesh atop cubes of watermelon, and even this minuscule amount of the bug is enough to infuse an entire mouthful. It’s no wonder their extract is a common ingredient in Thai sauces.

  Conservative eaters are likely to prefer to stick to what they know, but if you’re anything like me, you’ll find this galaxy of mysterious new flavors simply too compelling to resist. Indeed, some of the world’s top gastronauts have begun to explore it in earnest.

  Noma is the much-buzzed-about restaurant in Copenhagen, Denmark, that beat out elBulli for Restaurant magazine’s best restaurant in the world award in 2010 and has managed to hold on to the title for three years running. A tiny place on the waterfront edge of an old stone maritime warehouse, the restaurant’s trappings are so subtle you’d miss it if you weren’t really looking. Yet Noma turned down close to a million would-be diners in the last year alone. From its windows, the city skyline, with its slender church spires and geometric modern architecture, is silhouetted so beautifully in the pinkening sunset that famous head chef René Redzepi comes out to snap a quick photo, then ducks back in before becoming the subject of photos himself. Redzepi was recently named one of Time magazine’s World’s 100 Most Influential People.

  Ten years ago, Copenhagen was virtually unknown as far as food went, a “culinary backwater,” as Michael Booth called it in Copenhagen Encounter. In other words, no one went to Denmark for the food, unless they had a hankering for reindeer meat. Today people fly from all over the world to sample aspects of the fiercely home-proud food movement that has flourished here, known as the New Nordic Cuisine, largely established by Redzepi and his Noma cofounder, Claus Meyer.

  Redzepi’s perspective on the New Nordic Cuisine has extended its tentacles to gourmets around the world as chefs strive to imitate his style, for which intrepid diners pay $400 apiece to eat things like fried reindeer moss, hay ash, twigs, ants and seaweed. This may sound like the world’s biggest rip-off, but the idea is that one is eating, well, ideas taken from nature, refined through art and tradition, and re-presented as nature on the plate.

  “The flavors at Noma are intense. They’re not for everyone,” Daniel Giusti, the former chef of 1789 in Washington, DC, now a soldier in Redzepi’s army, told the Washington Post. “There’s an aura about this restaurant that I’ve never seen before. René can do anything he wants.”

  The New Nordic Cuisine is about the fusion of immediacy and history at once. It’s about what is available locally, seasonally, and, generally, in abundance—the here and now of nutrient sources. It’s also about the identity of a place, both naturally and culturally. In the Nordic region—which comprises Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Sweden, the Faroe Islands, Greenland, Svalbard, and Åland—food preservation techniques like fermenting and pickling have been popular for centuries, likely because of the percentage of the year spent in cold, dark winter. Food has to last, to warm, to nourish deeply—but also to inspire and invigorate during the long, lightless months. Ingredients can be extended but also intensified through the application of salt, yeasts, mold, and time.

  This is all the easier to grasp now in the beginning of November, when it’s already so cold I have to wear two jackets, gloves, and a thick hat at all times. I’m here in Copenhagen to visit Nordic Food Lab (NFL), the R&D branch of Noma.

  Taking humble ingredients and elevating them to a lofty status is Redzepi’s proven specialty. In early 2012, he posed the question: If he could serve bark, branches, weeds, and other dubiously edible ingredients at Noma, why couldn’t he serve the humblest ingredient of all—insects?

  He tasked NFL, the nonprofit institute he established and then dedicated to searching and stretching the boundaries of edibility, with discovering the answer. Since then, they’ve been experimenting with various species, trying to find the most delicious ways of presenting ingredients viewed as nonedible by the public.

  Docked just across the cold black canal is NFL’s floating houseboat of a home. Like Noma, it has an unassuming exterior—a small gray boat surrounded by bicycles. Much has been written about the relatively small expanse bracketed by Noma and NFL. But no one has written about their foray into edible insects.

  I show up bright and early in the chilly rain. The boat looks cozy and inviting, with its squares of warm yellow glass gleaming against the gray; a clean, well-lighted place for cooks. I make it onto the boat’s front porch, where I hover in front of the glass doors and wave.

  A handful of edgily stylish, serious-looking men, each with his own air
of focused intensity, ushers me inside. There’s somber Michael Bom Frost, who splits his time between being director of NFL and director of studies for the Gastronomy and Health program at Copenhagen University. Next is animated Scotsman Benedict Reade, the new head of culinary research and development, followed by stoic, tattooed Lars Williams, Ben’s predecessor and current R&D director at Noma, and keen-eyed Josh Evans, an intern from Yale Sustainable Food Project. These guys help dream up and then test some of the most innovative food ideas in the world. I peel off my wet layers in the warmth of the space, which is spare yet welcoming like many Danish interiors. The room is part designer kitchen, part laboratory, part casually elegant meeting space. Stacks of beakers and flasks coexist with pots and pans. Containers holding various colors and consistencies have labels like BEETS, BREAD YEAST 11/09 and SORREL, RED WINE, BARLEY MOLD 02/07. It looks like exactly what it is: a preternaturally hip foodie think tank.

  Someone offers me coffee. I’d already decided to say yes to anything I’m offered here, and coffee’s obviously a no-brainer. I am handed it black, in a lovely little handmade cup. No mention of cream or sugar is made—everyone’s drinking theirs straight. I take a sip. It’s fantastic. Later, I’ll be very glad I had it—it revved my brain for the daylong conversation about food I was about to have with some of the world’s foremost thinkers on the subject. NFL is a team of people passionate about exploring and expressing ideas, be it through food or words.

  I ask them what they think of the idea that insects are the food of the future.

  “Well, if any one thing becomes the food of the future, that’s a very depressing future,” says Ben Reade in his charming brogue. “We need diversity, and that’s why we’re interested in looking at insects—it’s another walk of life that we can investigate. We have the whole phylogenetic tree that we can eat, so we have to look at all the different branches. I think it’s really important to make sure people realize that insects are another ingredient that can be added to a repertoire, and not suddenly become the ingredient, when there is no the ingredient, is there? That’s only an economist’s way of looking at things. And if economists look at food too much, then things get dangerous.”

  “The same thing happened with soybeans, right?” adds researcher Josh Evans. “Soybeans have been used for hundreds of thousands of years in many cultures, and they’re perfectly healthy if they’re prepared the right way. But once they were touted as the ingredient that everyone will consume, that will save the world, that’s when vast swathes of the Amazon were cut down.”

  “We see insects not as the food of the future but as an interesting addition to the foods we already have,” says Michael Bom Frost, whose background is in sensory science (whatever that means). “To convince Europe to eat insects, it’s not enough to fry them up or to extract the protein. I think we have to lower the barriers for first-time entomophagists. If you just hand someone a cricket, and say, ‘Eat it!’ I think there’s a ninety-nine percent chance of rejection. But if you give them something that’s really delicious, that’s in a familiar setting, I think we can lower the outright rejection rate a lot. And I think that’s really important because then we can start building on it.”

  Michael offers Singapore as an example, where they are using a water filtration system to treat and reuse the water from the sewers. If you think about it, they’re drinking shit water, but the truth is it’s perfectly safe to drink. On the one hand, there is disgust, but on the other, there is a societal need that must be addressed.

  “We want to address this need with deliciousness as the vehicle for promoting insects, and not saying, ‘Eat this because it’s good for the environment,’ or ‘because it’s healthy protein,’ but ‘because it tastes good,’” says Michael.

  The term “deliciousness” is bandied about with great seriousness here at NFL, and we discuss how this mouth-first approach applies to eating insects—asking first, “How does it taste?” instead of “What is it?” Nothing edible should be considered off-limits just because of our prejudices about it.

  “No ideas are inherently disgusting. That’s food fascism,” says Ben.

  Michael, Josh, and I head out to the seashore to forage for periwinkle sea snails, shrimp, and “strand hoppers,” which are essentially sand fleas. Strand is Danish for beach. We’ll be fishing for aquatic invertebrates.

  On the way over, I learn what it means to be a food sensory scientist. What Michael does is scientifically interpret taste tests, usually to help develop healthier products that still taste good. One of his most notable accomplishments was coming up with data suggesting that 0.5 percent fat in milk was the lowest amount necessary for consumers to feel satisfaction. Today, that category makes up 40 percent of milk sales in Denmark.

  “It’s about finding a sweet spot between health and good taste in a common food,” says Michael with a twinkle in his eye. It’s clear he is passionate about what he does.

  The sparse, beautiful beach scene blows me away. The glassy waves of the Øresund Strait lap gently on the shore of the Amager Strand, an artificial island added by the city in 2005, which can be reached by metro. Wave-tangled, multicolored ribbons of seaweed line the sand, like the streamers of a wild, forgotten birthday party. It’s almost winter, so there won’t be any parties here today; it’s about 40 degrees even in the intermittent sun. The only other people out here are a few locals walking their dogs.

  Michael and Josh laughingly pull on their giant army-green waders, bought especially for the occasion. I ask how cold the water is, if people go swimming here in the summertime. I try to picture the empty beach full of people and noise, where now there’s just wind and sand.

  “People go swimming here all year round,” says Josh. “Crazy Danes.”

  They gather up their nets: one giant, practically person-sized one for Michael, a smaller green one for Josh. They step into the waves and march out into the water, soon up to their hips in the chilly Øresund. The water is clear, so they can hone in on their tiny prey.

  The ocean is a choppy slate-blue extension of the sky, through which billowy mountain ranges of cloud patterns pass. Denmark is big-sky country. The light changes every few minutes, and I snap madly away at the scene of the two epicurean fishermen/academics, caught between sea and sky as they collect ingredients from the blue expanse. A line of white wind turbines in the background completes the scene, as well as part of the context: Copenhagen aims to be the world’s first carbon-neutral city by 2025. Crazy Danes, indeed.

  “How is it out there?” I call. They’ve gone quite a ways out, insulated by the thick rubber and unimpeded by the smooth waves. They wave back, grinning.

  Michael is the first to wade back in with his catch. He kneels down and shakes clumps of olive-green bladder wrack into a bucket. Sea snails, shrimp, and tiny, darting strand hoppers fall out.

  Context, Michael and Josh say, is as important as the ingredients on the plate. Taste, woven with philosophy and shot through with science, seems to be the conversational culture of this team, members of which must be as steeped in this sort of rhetoric as their weeds are in fermenting brew.

  “People eating food is the only way they get the full experience,” Michael says.

  “In the same way that there’s no such thing as a painting without the context of the painting—even in the most modernistic of galleries, it’s still a white wall,” says Josh. “There’s still a texture, there’s still lighting, there’s still a mood that’s created. There’s no such thing as a taste without a context.”

  The sea air bites at our cheeks, the wind flaps through our hair. The waves curl under, collapsing gently against the sand. Jellyfish nestled in masses of seaweed rock forward and back under the clear, undulating surface of the water. The clouds are piled high, slow as migrating herds across the wide blue sky. Josh runs down the beach and comes back with an armful of treasure: beach mustard. I grab a purple-flowered stalk and take a bite. It’s just like a delicate broccoli, salted by the sea air
.

  Michael fishes out a nearly transparent, gangly shrimp from the bucket’s brine. Like Lisa Simpson said, they aren’t really that much different from grasshoppers.

  “Noma currently serves a live shrimp on ice with a brown butter emulsion, and for that, people are like, whoa,” says Josh. “It’s still sort of at the frontier of what’s seen as acceptable. Or even delicious.”

  “We can eat them alive and pretend we’re at Noma,” says Michael.

  I find I have no qualms about putting the live shrimp in my mouth, especially in this context. I wasn’t worried about hurting it—it would be crushed instantly between my teeth, as good a death as any it might encounter living in the wild. I recalled something Redzepi had said about these live shrimp: “The taste of these shrimp changes from day to day, depending on the conditions of the ocean. Eating them is really like tasting the ocean on that day.”

  Today the ocean tastes sweet, and tender, and fresh, with a subtle brightness that is hard to qualify. Maybe this is what the Japanese are on about, with their super-fresh food and live sushi.

  Back at the lab, we boil up the sea snails we collected. Josh leads me on an appetizer journey around the kitchen. First I try the fermented grasshopper garum that tastes like fish sauce in its complexity and emphasizes the umami flavor of many insects. Then I taste the bee-larvae granola he’s made for a breakfast event they’re holding next week. It’s crunchy and creamy and savory at once. Delicious.

  The sea snails cook up quickly and are light, fresh, and chewy, like an extra-firm shrimp. As with all the other invertebrate morsels I’ve tried here, there certainly isn’t anything off-putting about them. Quite the opposite, in fact. If you didn’t know they were insects and snails, you’d never question them. Slap a fancy title on them, like they did with Chilean sea bass (a.k.a. Patagonian toothfish), put them on the menu at an upscale restaurant, and people would order them.