Insect museum in New Orleans serves up tasty bugs

Insect museum in New Orleans serves up tasty bugs

The Audubon Butterfly Garden and Insectarium serves a tantalizing variety of crickets, worms, and other insects in their exotic desserts.

Bug appetit, anyone? The Audubon Butterfly Garden and Insectarium in New Orleans is now serving an array of tasty desserts made with, well, bugs. For the adventurous eater, it’s a whole new culinary experience.

The menu includes a cricket marshmallow fudge, toffee made with mealworms, and skewered crickets available to dip in a chocolate fondue fountain. Wax worms and cricket cookies are also served to curious and enthusiastic diners.

At 23,000 square feet, the Audubon Butterfly Garden and Insectarium is the largest museum in the United States dedicated solely to creepy-crawly critters. An array of cockroaches, bees, ants, wasps, beetles, and butterflies fill its displays- and now its eateries.

The museum’s visitor program manager, Jack Lemann, believes that bugs are a healthy treat. The FDA currently allows 60 microscopic bug bits in every 100 grams of chocolate, so Lemann assumed it wasn’t a far step from eating insect fragments to ingesting the entire insect.

“We get every range of reaction in here,” said Lemann. “There are people who come here knowing about Bug Appetit, and they come to eat the bugs. We also have people who have trepidation and anxiety. Some just won’t try it.”

For the slightly more squeamish, the museum also houses the Tiny Termite Cafe, an eatery that does not serve bugs.

Insects have been eaten by humans for millions of years. Crispy fried tarantulas are a delicacy in Southeast Asia, while Casu Marzu is an insect-riddled cheese eaten in Sardinia. Entomophagy, or the ingestion of insects, has been recently viewed as a possible way to help feed the world’s growing population.

Currently, there are over 239 species of grasshopper, 344 species of beetle, and 20 species of dragonfly consumed worldwide by a variety of different cultures. Other insect species, such as worms and crickets, are also eaten- and can be found at the Audubon Butterfly Garden and Insectarium, skewered on a stick and ready to be dipped in a chocolate fountain.

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