Category: Eating Cicadas

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Eating Cicadas Music

A new Snappy Cicada Pizza video for 2021!

Snappy Tomato Pizza has once again transformed into Snappy Cicada Pizza.

More information here, posted by Ed on another post.

Here you go — this will help: Snappy Cicada Pizza Video: https://youtu.be/p86ch6qVfHU

We have just announced our partnership with The Christ Hospital to celebrate the birth of the cicadas and newborns at the hospital — see press release here: https://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/ReleaseNg/4194884

It’s been 17 years since Cincinnati last saw the Brood X cicadas, and there’s no doubt that their return has caused a lot of “buzz” around the Tristate! The Christ Hospital wanted to do something to commemorate this wild and rare time and we can’t think of a better partner to help us than Cincinnati’s own Snappy Tomato Pizza. Remember that jingle from the 80s? While there was never an actual Snappy Cicada Pizza, Snappy still brushes it off just for fun every cicada resurgence!

This time around, The Christ Hospital and Snappy Tomato Pizza are teaming up to start a new tradition. To help welcome newborns and cicadas, each baby born at both The Christ Hospital Mt. Auburn and Liberty Township locations over the next few weeks will receive a free, limited-edition, “All the Buzz” onesie! Parents will also get a coupon for a free pizza (cicadas, unfortunately, not included) and Snappy swag generously donated by Snappy Tomato Pizza!

Here’s some previous incarnations: Snappy Cicada Pizza Jingles.

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Eating Cicadas Music

Snappy Cicada Pizza Jingles

There’s a pizza restaurant chain in the Cincinnati area called Snappy Tomato Pizza that occasionally runs commercials for Snappy Cicada Pizza. It’s a joke of course. Or is it? Maybe they’ll do it again in 2021.

Listen to the songs:

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Eating Cicadas Magicicada Periodical

Are cicadas safe to eat?

Update (July 2018): A company called Meat Maniac sells cicadas in a can. Don’t know which species, but they have a “nutty flavor”.

Also, send me a box of these cicadas from China… um, I mean Chinese City Tells Citizens to Fight Bug Infestation By Eating Them.

Meat Maniac cicadas in a can

Also, read this amazing story about how Brood VII cicadas helped kept the Onondaga Nation alive during a time of famine.

The original article from 2006:

[WARNING:] Cicadas, 17-year cicadas at least, are well-known bioaccumulators of mercury. If consuming mercury is a concern, you should not eat cicadas.

Dogs, cats, squirrels, fish, and people can’t stop eating cicadas. Are they crazy, or “crazy like a fox”? (Foxes will eat them too.)

Pets and other domesticated animals

This is a cartoon of a dog about to eat a cicada

People want to know: “is it safe for my pets to eat cicadas”. The truth is in most cases your pets will be fine if they eat a few cicadas, however, you still need to be cautious and keep a close eye on your pets. Watch them for odd behavior, and don’t let them gorge themselves. Be cautious: the Humane Society has warned: “Cicadas Dangerous to Pets” [the original link is gone].

Pet-related concerns:

  1. Pets can choke on the rigid wings and other hard body parts of the cicadas.
  2. Pets will gorge themselves on cicadas, and possibly become ill and vomit.
  3. Pets who consume cicadas sprayed with copious amounts of pesticide can and will die.
  4. Pets might have an allergic reaction to the cicadas just as people do.

Bottom line: play it safe, and don’t let your pets eat cicadas if you can help it.

People:

Whether they’re curious, hungry, or doing it for the shock value, people are eating cicadas. Asian peoples have eaten cicadas for centuries, and there are records of Native Americans eating cicadas. People joke that they’re Atkins friendly [also no gluten]. I’ve heard they taste like asparagus, popcorn, minty shrimp, and piney shrimp — YUMMY PINE.

A man in Bloomington Indiana had an allergic reaction to cicadas after eating 30. He was also allergic to seafood — both cicadas and shrimps are arthropods so this makes sense.

[Note to self, “Do it, Dan, don’t be a wimp!”]

People related concerns:

  1. Cicadas are well known bioaccumulators of mercury.
  2. You could choke on their hard body parts.
  3. You could have an allergic reaction. If you’re allergic to seafood, don’t think about eating them.
  4. Do you really want to eat something that’s been marinating in lawn fertilizers,
    pesticides and other chemicals for the past 17 years?
  5. If you get the gout, it makes sense to avoid them.

People related links:

  1. National Geographic: National Geographic News :Low-Fat, High Protein Cicadas: New Health Snack
  2. Stephanie Bailey’s Internet insect cookbook has tips on how to prepare insects for human consumption! [note that the link now goes to an article by Stephanie about eating insects in general.]

Bottom line: You’re not a contestant on Fear Factor [a reality TV show in the 00s]. Why eat cicadas when you can choose from many of the fine menu choices at Applebees [a chain restaurant]?

Fish, turkeys, squirrels and everything else

If a creature has a mouth or some other mechanism to digest cicadas, it likely will try to eat them. Cicadas make great fish bait. Squirrels (yes, they’re nuts for cicadas too), birds, possums, raccoons, foxes, other insects, fungi… they all love cicadas.

Bottom line: let nature do the dirty work and clean your yard one bite at a time.

Tom, Cicada Gormandize:
Tom eats a cicada


Categories
Eating Cicadas Folklore

Cicada soap and snacks

I came across an article from 1876 in the Bossier Banner titled Edible Insects (The Bossier Banner., June 22, 1876. (Bellevue, Bossier Parish, La.)). The article covers many types of insects but has at least five paragraphs devoted to cicadas. The article uses the term “locust” interchangeably with “cicada”, and the author does seem to know the difference (see the last paragraph).

The most interesting bit of information is that people might have used cicadas to make soap and cakes.

I believe, in this paragraph, locust may refer to the grasshopper locust, but it could be cicadas as well:

Among the folk-lore of the Khoikhoi you may find this legend: “Faraway in the North-land dwells the great master-conjurer, who, when he wishes to confer a benefit on his people, rolls away a stone from the mouth of a certain deep pit and from it issues a host of winged messengers who soar away to the southward and there surrender themselves as a food to the hungry Africans.” These messengers are the famous locusts of which it is recorded that John the Baptist ate, and which are to-day sold by the cart-load in the cities of Morocco.

The “locust” in this paragraph is very likely cicadas, because of the use of the words “harmless” and “celebrated for its song”:

With how much affection the Romans spoke of the locust! “A little, harmless creature,” says one historian, “celebrated for its song from most ancient times.”

No reference to “locust” was made — definitely cicadas:

The same song was so dear to the Greeks, “because it seemed to give life to the solitude of our shady groves and academic walks, and conveys to our minds the idea of a perfectly happy being,” that they kept the insect in cages, and gave it pet names, as, “The Nightingale of the Nymphs,” “Sweet Prophet of Summer,” “The Love of the Muses.” Then, after all this lavishing of affection, they are it!

Could be either cicadas or grasshopper locusts:

Aristotle, with the smack of the lips, says of the female locusts, caught before the depositing of their eggs, and fried in sweet oil: “Quo tempore gustu suavissimo sunt”— “at which time they are very sweet.”

Sounds like it could be either:

Another naturalist says when the cicadae first leaves the earth they are plump and oily, and used in the making soap. Bread is also made of them, and in Africa a kind of sweet cake. This is probably what Shakespeare refers to when Iago, plotting against the Moor, says, in his wrath: “The food that to him now is as luscious as locusts shall be to him shortly as bitter as coloquintida” — the bitter apple of Crete.

This paragraph makes me think the author knows the difference between cicadas and grasshoppers:

These little, dew-sucking locusts are not to be confused with the strong-jawed grasshoppers, the Heupferde, or “hay-horses,” as Germans call them, and as Martin Luther translated the word from the Hebrew text, for, though used as food, it is the grasshopper that commits such depredations on the foliage.

Read/see the article on the Library of Congress website.

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Eating Cicadas

delicious cicadas



delicious cicadas, originally uploaded by istolethetv.

Cicadas: it’s what’s for dinner!

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Eating Cicadas

Weird Meat: Cicadas in Jinan

Weird Meat: Cicadas in Jinan. Weird Meat is a blog about non-Western food (no cows and chickens) like cicadas. Check it out.

So minutes later, we had a huge plate of fried bugs. I’d say about a hundred of these little bite-size insects were deep-fried crispy. Everyone liked them. Even my friend Boya from Texas, usually not as adventurous a diner, enjoyed them.

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Anatomy Eating Cicadas Magicicada

UC Engineering Researchers Find Mercury In Cicadas

I came across this article thanks to Google’s news alerts: UC Engineering Researchers Find Mercury In Cicadas. I’ve never eaten a cicada and I don’t plan on doing so in the future, but a lot of “cicada maniacs” do, so here’s your PSA.

Think twice before you eat one of Cincinnati’s Brood-X cicadas. That’s the warning from researchers at the University of Cincinnati College of Engineering, who have found surprising levels of mercury in these insects.

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Eating Cicadas

Cicada Pie Recipe

These sort of things disgust me, but I’m posting it anyway.

Four cups of chopped rhubarb, 1 cup of fresh cicadas, washed and any hard parts removed; 1&1/3 cups white sugar, 6 tablespoons all-purpose flour, 1tablespoon butter, and a 9-inch double crust pie crust.

You’ll find the rest of the recipe in this article from the Arizona Republic: Answering bug query is easy as pie.

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Eating Cicadas Magicicada

Jake is Cicada Maniac

From this article in the Shippensberg Sentinel:

Jake Crider takes a bite of a chocolate-covered cicadas. He has kept a container of pre-cooked, frozen periodical cicadas that he harvested last year.

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Eating Cicadas

Cicada Soup

Deep End Dining has a post about cicada soup, including a picture of a big steaming bowl of them.