David Gordon authors The Eat-a-Bug Cookbook

From the sublime to the ridiculous: David Gordon holds two of his books.

Call it negative reinforcement, David Gordon says. He writes a beautiful, coffee table book on the Nisqually watershed and garners only two reviews. But when he comes out with The Field Guide to the Slug and The Compleat Cockroach, it’s an immediate media event. So don’t blame him that his latest project is The Eat-a-Bug Cookbook. “You get so much more attention for the weird projects,” Gordon says.

Not that Gordon himself is weird. Most of the time he’s a serious science writer who works for Washington Sea Grant. He has a degree in biology with a specialty in marine animals, not entomology.

But does his latest book title really mean what it seems to mean? Are we talking about eating insects? Yes indeed, says Gordon. In fact Europe and North America are the only two places on earth that are too finicky to eat these land-dwelling members of the arthropod phylum that includes—in addition to insects—spiders, scorpions and centipedes. Our loss, it seems. Land arthropods are high in protein and vitamins and low in fat. Gordon’s book will tell you all that, as well as give you recipes for preparing this unfamiliar food tastily.

How about some dragonflies in curried coconut, for example? Or some scorpion scaloppini? Gordon says his pasta salad with crickets had samplers coming back for seconds. And he’s not averse to having some fun in naming his dishes. There’s pest-o, made of weevils in basil sauce and fried green tomato hornworms (tomato hornworms are caterpillars that eat tomato plants).

All but one of the dishes in the book are original, but Gordon did a lot of research before creating them so he didn’t have to experiment too much. The reason? The ingredients are often quite expensive; the scorpions, for example, were $10 apiece. At that price he couldn’t afford too many trial runs. Fortunately, he’d had a fair amount of experience with bug eating before writing the book. “I’ve traveled extensively in Asia, where insect eating is common,” Gordon explains. “Also, while I was researching the cockroach book I talked to a lot of entomologists, for whom this is sometimes a sideline interest.”

And where does one shop for the ingredients in these dishes? Gordon doesn’t advise catching your own; rather, he says the best sources are pet food stores and zoo suppliers, where the bugs in question have been raised to be food and there’s no question of pesticide contamination. His book includes a list of resources for buying ingredients.

Of course, Gordon doesn’t expect to convert too many North Americans to bug eating. The bias against it, he says, is just too great. In fact, his own wife and daughter were “horrified” at the dishes being concocted in their kitchen and had no interest in tasting them. But that wasn’t his purpose in writing this or any of his other books—either the weird ones or the more “ordinary.” It was, Gordon says, all about environmental education.

That’s something he’s been interested in for a long time. His first job in the biological sciences was at Shedd Aquarium in Chicago, followed by a stint at Point Defiance Zoo in Tacoma. In both jobs he built exhibits, collected specimens and took care of the animals, but he wrote as a sideline. He started doing a weekly outdoors column for the Seattle Weekly, and enjoyed it so much that the writing just kept expanding. Eventually he gave up his job and became a freelancer.

Then came the field guide books, written for Seattle publisher Sasquatch Books. Gordon started with orcas and bald eagles, but it was when he came out with Field Guide to the Slug that people really paid attention. “I’ve had people come up to me and say they can never look at a slug in the same way again,” he says. “That taught me a lesson. Orcas and eagles are beautiful and important, but people already know about them. I want to teach them about things they’re surrounded by, but may not know anything about.” His next field guide was about the geoduck, and he followed that up with The Compleat Cockroach, published by Ten Speed Press in Berkeley.

Thanks to the books, Gordon has had the opportunity to do other kinds of environmental education. He has a presentation called “The Compleat Cockroach Traveling Roadshow,” complete with cartoons, slides and a car horn that plays La Cucaracha. And right now he’s gearing up to present “The Essentials of Bug Cooking” that will include cooking demonstrations and of course, free samples of the results. The Eat-a-Bug Cookbook, he says, provides a fair amount of information about the insects being recommended for food. “If you pick topics that are outrageous,” he says, “you can sneak the science in.”

That’s his aim in a column he writes for the ABC News World Wide Web site. Called “Mad or Rad,” the column spotlights scientists doing unusual work, like the man who studies how leeches bite, or the one who has built a machine to make a person sick—used as part of his work on nausea. Each week, the Web site’s visitors get to vote on whether the scientist is mad (crazy) or rad. With an average of 1,000 people voting (although there have been as many as 4,000), 95 percent of the time, the majority of votes have been “rad,” Gordon says. That’s no accident, considering that he tries to choose serious scientists doing work that has stood the scrutiny of peer review. One exception was the woman in California who is convinced that the ancient Egyptians built the pyramids with the aid of kites. The vote on her was definitely mad.

But then, you have to throw in a wild card every now and then, Gordon believes. After all, this is a man who recently was hired to be a “slug wrangler” on a Disney production in the Olympic rain forest. His job, he explains, was to get the slugs to crawl around at the appropriate times and to get them comfortable on a particular individual’s hand. “It’s not difficult if you know anything about slug behavior,” he says.

At this point he knows a lot about slug behavior, and geoduck behavior, and cockroach behavior. In fact, he may know more about these topics than most people want to know. So what’s next? Gordon says he doesn’t know. “I’m waiting for something I can get really enthusiastic about,” he says. “If you’re going to write a book, you have to have a passion for the subject.”

Which leads to an obvious question, but we won’t ask it. ¶

Nancy Wick