A Different Perspective on Pests - Food for Thought

As summer arrived early in the Mountains I saw lots of emerging moths and beetles, and remembered that this traditionally was a time of plenty for the early indigenous residents. Then in my research I discovered a new word Entomophagy - the eating of insects. Over 1200 species of insects are used as food by people throughout the world.

The cultural bias in the modern Western world against eating insects is interesting. In the Torah with all its culinary rules, Moses says that eating locusts, crickets, and grasshoppers is acceptable under Jewish law. King Solomon is rumored to have fed locusts to his wives and in the New Testament, John the Baptist is said to have dined on honey and locusts. Roman and Greek scholars such as Pliny the Elder, Herodotus, and Diodorus also recorded instances of insect-eating.

Today, largely because of our agricultural practices, most of us see an insect and think only of pests, although there are exceptions of course. After all this modern bias is contradictory to the popularity of honey, which could be defined as ‘bee vomit’.


Locally significant in the Blue Mountains is the Bogong moth. These are the medium-sized brown/grey moths that hibernate in cracks and crevices up here on the escarpments, and then migrate down to the Canberra region, where they breed. Their arrival in Canberra is often publicised as they take over and cover city buildings and lights.

The larvae of these moths are known as cutworms. They eat more than twice their weight a day in leaves and in enough numbers they eat everything right down to the ground. If you ate as much each day as a 65kg Bogan moth does you would be eating something like 30 loaves of bread, 3 kg of butter, 18 dozen eggs and 3 hams, and drinking over 100 L of milk. This is obviously why they are seen as a pest!

But this is also why they were an important food source to the Gundungarra and Dharug peoples - an impressive 27% protein and 20% fat. By comparison possum and goanna have a mere 3% fat.

Another local aboriginal food source was the legless larvae of the Longicorn Beetle that attack Black Wattle trees. They are usually referred to as ‘witchetty grubs’ but this is an all-encompassing term that Europeans gave to the immature larvae of both edible beetles and moths. Originally the name came from the moth larvae that infest the Witjuti bush (Acacia kempeana) of Central Australia. There are in fact over 1000 species of Longicorn Beetles.

The Dharug called our local species burradhan. These grubs have 33% fat and traditionally are eaten raw or cooked on coals. A friend tells me that raw they have a pleasant almond-type scrambled egg flavour; while the cooked version has a crispy chicken skin texture.

Julieta Ramos-Elorduy, a researcher at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, suggests there are no fewer than 34 reasons to explore insects as a food source, including their impressive nutritive value, the easy of breeding them in captivity, and their high birth-rate. She goes so far as to suggest enriching foods with insect flour in order to make them more nutritious.

For example 100 grams of cricket contains: 121 calories, 12.9 grams of protein, 5.1 g. of carbohydrates, 75.8 mg. calcium, 185.3 mg. of phosphorous, 9.5 mg. of iron, 0.36 mg. of thiamine, 1.09 mg. of riboflavin, and 3.10 mg. of niacin. And with a mere 5.5 g. of fat this is high in nutrients but with far less fat than either of the earlier examples.

Then there’s another new word I have learnt - Heliciculture - snail-farming. I hadn’t realised that the common garden snail that plagues our vegie patches is in fact a Mediterranean import that went feral. It is actually one of the French ‘escargot’ snails. All that we would need to do is feed them properly and purge them before cooking.

Since my family are omnivores and as a participant in Margot’s Sustainable Brunches (see Autumn 2007 Newsletter) I may just have to look into this a bit more.

References for further reading
Stockton, E (ed), 1996, Blue Mountains Dreaming - The Aboriginal Heritage, A Three Sisters Publication, Winmalee, NSW.
Ramos-Elorduy, J ,2000, Creepy Crawley Cuisine, Park Street Press
Snail Farming www.dpi.vic.gov.au
Wikipedia
Sue Girard