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Anna Maria Jakubek, age 10, at a snake farm in Bangkok, Thailand. Photo by Zygmunt J. Jakubek.

Anna Maria Jakubek reports on food. But she also has a  love for the weird and the vile, which ends up taking over. Her work grosses us out, but, as she explains, that’s our short-coming, not hers.

Anna Maria Jakubek:

We all have things about us so ingrained that whether we like it or not, they won’t go away. In my case, it’s an interest in bizarre, disgusting, off-putting, taboo topics. And being a journalist is great for that. I’ve covered leeches, urine, rat infestations, vomit, and I’ve even snacked on bugs. My professional body of work – it’s one big eww. As my friend Kate puts it, I’m a tiny, soft-spoken gal who’s elbow-deep in the gross. Her theory is that I’m an alien. I look at everything through an unbiased lens, as if I’d just landed from outerspace. The result: What’s gross to you is tabula rasa to me.

Like most things, that there is rooted in my childhood, or one could say “uprooted.” I grew up hopping from country to country. I was the perpetual outsider. I was born in Poland, we moved to Boston when I was four, Japan at nine, Canada at 12, and there were many short trips in-between. In the two years we lived in Japan, we visited 15 of the neighboring countries. And no matter where we were, we did as the locals do. Here’s my mum, Beata:

“In Poland we ate with forks and knives and spoons, in Japan with chopsticks, in Malaysia with our hands, and we never said that this is right or this is wrong. It’s just different.”

She and my dad Zygmunt are Polish, really Polish, going back at least 800 years. They grew up under communism and always wanted to travel but didn’t have the money or the family ties to do so. So when the opportunity came up in their twenties, they grabbed it – for themselves AND for me, their only child. I grew up travelling, because they wanted me to see what else was out there; all of it – the good, the bad and the ugly.

Wherever we were, my scientist parents sought out the unique. In Bangkok, we visited a snake farm and watched them milk cobras for venom. In Katmandu, we saw an open-air cremation. I watched a man’s elbow crack in two and fall through the flame. I can still smell the rotten-egg stench of his burnt fingernails and hair. In Malaysia, we visited a temple where dozens of snakes slept coiled on platters, right out there in the open. And in Tibet, we went to a mountain littered with dead bodies left for the vultures to eat. I can see what’s unusual about that kind of travel now, but at the time I took it as the norm.

Here’s my dad:  “We didn’t consider it gross, we considered it interesting.”

The same goes for my work now: I look for the interesting. But, as my dad points out, because of my early travels, the bar is raised high on what will draw me in.

Zygmunt: “You try to find something which is potentially interesting and since you are exposed to so many different things, something potentially interesting would have to be something from outside the boundaries of normal for you.”

My parents taught me to keep my eyes open and to look hard without judging. I didn’t always want to. But now my eyes don’t shut, and that’s a personal choice.

A Tarantula. Photo by Sascha Grabow

Tempura-Battered Tarantula

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“What I do with a tarantula when I’m going to prepare it, the very first thing I do of course is freeze it and defrost it. I don’t want to cook with a live tarantula – that would be a difficult one.

But I also take a sharp knife and I cut off the abdomen, that big round part of the body that’s really full of fluid; that’s pretty much all it is, is fluid. So I take that and I discard it.

And then using either a cigarette lighter or something like that – a crème brule torch – I actually will singe off all the hairs on the tarantula. Usually on the bottom, on the abdomen, there are hairs in particular that the tarantula can shoot – almost like people think about porcupines doing (although that’s a myth). But they can actually release these hairs and they actually create a very itchy sensation if they get lodged in your skin. So singeing off all the hairs is a really good way to prevent that from being an issue.

And then I can take the body, spread the legs out nicely – so you get a nice even spread – drop them into tempura batter, make sure that it’s coated all the way through and then put it into the hot oil and fry it up.
And that’s the basic recipe for tempura-battered tarantula.”

–David George Gordon, a.k.a. The Bug Chef. He is the author of the “Eat-a-Bug” Cookbook.

—–

Orthopteran Orzo

*Orthoptera is the umbrella name for grasshoppers, crickets, locusts and other bugs

Yield: six servings

Ingredients

3 cups vegetable broth

1 cup orzo

1 cup two- or three-week-old cricket nymphs

1 tablespoon butter

1 clove garlic, minced

½ cup chopped onion

½ cup grated carrot

¼ cup finely diced red pepper

¼ cup finely diced green pepper

2 tablespoons chopped parsley

Bring broth to a boil, then stir in the orzo.

Continue boiling the pasta until it is tender (about 10 minutes); drain any extra liquid, then quickly add carrot and red and green peppers. Mix evenly and set aside.

In a separate skillet, melt the butter, adding the minced garlic, onions and crickets. Sauté briefly, until the onions are clear and the garlic and crickets have browned.

Combine cricket mixture, including any liquid, with the orzo and vegetables, top with parsley and serve.

From “The Eat-a-Bug Cookbook” by David George Gordon (Ten Speed Press)

Click here to listen to the full radio story.

Guacamole with chips and fried grasshoppers at Mexican restaurant Chiles & Chocolate in Park Slope. Photo by Anna Maria Jakubek

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By Anna Maria Jakubek

Chiles and Chocolate is a Park Slope restaurant that serves authentic food from Oaxaca, Mexico.

Salmon marinated in orange juice, green pepper stuffed with chicken and cheese and Mole Negro with grilled veggies. But there’s one item that really jumps out: fried grasshoppers. For a dollar you can get a bowl of them to go along with your guacamole and chips.

“Green. Mushy. And bits of tomato. And legs. Grasshopper legs,” said Valente Villarreal, a waiter at Chiles and Chocolate. He was born in Mexico but grew up in Brooklyn. He says the owner gets the grasshoppers from Mexico, already fried and seasoned, and very much dead. Villarreal opens the container and shakes its contents.

“Do you hear that? They’re jumping right now. I’m trying to pick out a big one,” said Villarreal.

And then he sinks his teeth into one.

“Here we go. Crunch. It’s very crunchy,” Villarreal said.

The grasshoppers are about an inch in length and half that wide. They’re spicy and red from the chili seasoning and they taste like the lime juice they were dipped ini. They’re really not bad, not bad at all. Villarreal says grasshoppers are as popular in Oaxaca as potato chips are over here. Bugs are also part of the diet in other countries. In Japan they eat wasps, in South Africa it’s giant caterpillars, and in Bali dragonflies are on the menu.

But in our culture, insects aren’t food. Gabriella Petrick is a food historian at NYU.

“And there are many things – like, you know um a pencil! – Not food. Probably not a good idea to eat a pencil. Or grass. Or you know there are many weeds in your lawn – as long as you don’t put chemicals on it, you could pick and eat, but we don’t do it, because we ascribe a different category to that,” said Petrick.

She says that in the U.S. this practice of eating bugs will never fly. There’s a social hurdle: people judge you on the things you eat.

“So if you’re eating bugs or you know grasshoppers and the people around you think it’s vile and disgusting, you’re going to bealienated. Food is a social expression as well,” said Petrick.

In other words, you are what you eat. And no one wants to be thought of as a pest. Yet, bugs are actually good for you. Really good for you. The sixteen hundred or so edible varieties are rich in protein, minerals, vitamins and other nutrients. They have lots more protein than you’ll find in beef. They’re also better for the environment than other meat. That’s why some scientists and foodies advocate that we Westerners get on the bug diet. Arnold van Huis is a tropical entomologist at Wageningen University in the Netherlands. He’s been researching edible insects for over a decade and urgently believes they’re the answer.

“We cannot go on like the way we are doing just because of the growing world population and most of people are going to eat more mat and we just don’t have enough agricultural land to make this possible,” said von Haus.

He says all it’ll take is a paradigm shift.

“You often see if people don’t know that they’re eating insects, they may find it delicious. At the moment you tell them it’s an insect, they start vomiting. Just to show that it’s completely psychological,” said von Haus.

In fact, we don’t think about this but we’re actually eating insects already. According to a spokesperson for the FDA, it’s impossible to produce food completely free of pests. The agency publishes a booklet that lists the max number of insect and vermin parts allowable for each type of food. This Defect Levels Handbook, as it’s called, is scary to flip through. 100 grams of chocolate – or just a little over two standard Hershey’s bars – can have 60 insect fragments.

And there are other arguments for why our take on bugs doesn’t make sense. David George Gordon, a.k.a. “The Bug Chef” is a science writer and author of a cookbook of  bug recipes. He routinely does bug cooking shows across the country, and likes to point out how arbitrary our food habits are.

“I always say to people ‘what’s so glamorous about eating one of these? They look kind of like reptiles,” said Gordon.

Gordon remembers an 11-year-old boy who went back for four or five helpings of cricket and orzo pasta at one of the cooking events.

“And I was kind of teasing him – I said, ‘don’t they feed you at home?’ And he said, ‘this is way better than anything my mom ever made.’ So that was kind of, that’s like my greatest testimonial right there,” Gordon said.

The benefits of eating insects are definitely there. But while we may convince our minds, winning over our stomachs is another matter.

Click here for bug recipes.

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Food Advertisements at the Associated Supermarket in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. Photo by Anna Maria Jakubek/ Columbia Radio News

The World Bank reports that commodities have jumped in price since last June. Wheat has doubled. Others, like corn and sugar, have gone up more than 70%. In response, food corporations including Kraft and Kellogg announced that they’d be raising prices on as many as half of their products. Grocery shoppers everywhere are already feeling the crunch.

At the Associated grocery store in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, shopper Ida Collazo had heard about the commodity increase. She came for fish sticks and cake.

“Like before I could buy with $10, I could come home with 2 bags 3 bags at most, now it’s one bag. So it went up a lot,” Collazo says.

To keep her grocery bills down, Collazo bargain-shops around the neighborhood.

“Even if you have to walk ten blocks, you know, if they’re selling something cheaper, you’re going over there,” she says. ” You know, just walk. You get exercise too.”

Collazo says she understands that when commodities go up, prices have to as well. Adam Laufer is a Vice President at Associated.

“That’s something that’s not you know under our control,” he says. “ You know, we have to make a living also. It’s not, you know, that you make a fortune just on a can of peas.”

That said, Laufer suggests that buying generics – Associated Cereal, just for example – instead of brand-name products is a way of getting around some of the price hikes.

“You’re just not paying for the packaging, you’re not paying for the tv or cable advertising, or you know big huge billboards over the Holland tunnel, you know, pushing their products,” Laufer says.

Most people don’t realize how little food itself costs, says James Dunn, an agricultural economist at Penn State University.

“If you buy cornflakes for example, the cost of the corn in cornflakes is a very small amount of the price,” he says.

Even so, Dunn says he expects to see a 5% increase in food prices thanks to this commodity hike. He says that means that for every hundred dollars you spend on groceries, you’ll now be spending an extra five.

“Donald Trump will hardly notice it,” he says. “But there are plenty of people who are unemployed right now or just getting by, and they’ll notice it.”

Dunn himself admits he doesn’t have first hand knowledge of this because his wife does the shopping. But even households like his might not be immune. Take someone who earns $50,000 a year and spends $30,000 on rent. In New York City, that’s a big chunk of the middle class, says Joel Berg, who heads the New York City Coalition Against Hunger. He says all New-Yorkers pay a lot for necessities.

“Fuel, your metro card, your clothing, that rare rare entertainment – god knows how much movies cost – you’re definitely going to feel it hard in your wallet that there’s a 5% increase,” berg says.

Berg runs the city’s 1200 soup kitchens and food pantries and says the increased traffic there has been lower-income people. But he says the 5% percent hike in food prices will bring more people in the doors.

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A C letter grade at Gray's Papaya. Photo by Anna Maria Jakubek/Columbia Radio News

It’s been seven months since New York City adopted its new restaurant grading system, and about half the city’s restaurants have gotten letter grades for cleanliness. 13% got Cs, which means MANY violations. But  it’s unclear whether diners are paying attention.

The city’s Health Department introduced the letter grades to make diners more aware of food safety and, in turn, to put public pressure on restaurants to be clean. Health inspectors give restaurants an A for up to 13 violation points, a B for 14 to 27 and a C for more than 28. Bs and Cs can appeal, but once a grade is final, it has to be displayed up front where customers can see it.

Grays’s Papaya at 72nd and Broadway is a New York institution, famous for its cheap hotdogs, political slogans and lots of customers. And…it also has a bright orange C letter grade right in the front window.

“Oh wow,” said Mike Iannuzzi. “Um, no, I didn’t know what that was. I didn’t really pay attention to that when I walked in.”

Iannuzzi just polished off two Gray’s Papaya hotdogs. The restaurant received 35 violation points for problems like roaches, flies and contamination:

“Live roaches, nice,” said Iannuzzi. “Filthy flies on food… uh… not vermin proof that’s kinda scary.”

Iannuzzi says he has a good immune system, but he’ll avoid the Cs from now on.

“Working in the city, you come in contact with germs everyday, but you know it’s good to be able to avoid the germs when you can, so this is great,” Iannuzzi.

Others aren’t as bothered by the grade. Ruiwen Tan, a tourist from Singapore, points to the C and tells his friends the bad news. They go in anyway.

“The food is good and it’s been recommended, so we choose to ignore it,” said Tan.

Duke University behavioral economist Dan Ariely says this indifference may seem counterintuitive:

“So actually, it looks quite surprising that people are willing to go to restaurants that are so dirty and polluted,” said Ariely.

But he explains the willingness to put one’s head in the sand is actually a part of human nature.

“People over-weight their own experience, even if it’s not a relevant experience,” said Ariely. “You know, because the truth is, that when people experience the food in a restaurant, they don’t really know how to measure its cleanliness.”

He says diners also don’t know what the letter grades stand for. Ariely says a system based on emotion would be better.

“What does an A really mean? What does a B really mean?” asked Ariely. “If I saw maybe picture of it, that says that you know a C means that a rat ran over your plate, it would be much more vivid.”

Getting diners to pay attention is one thing, but then there’s the issue of how they should react. Andrew Rigie is the Director of Operations for the New York State Restaurant Association. The group fought hard against the public grading system. He says there’s just no reason to steer clear of low grades.

“I recognize that that restaurant is safe and sanitary enough to serve the public or the health department would close that restaurant,” said Rigie.

After all, a C is not an F.

“Hypothetically there’s over 1000 points that a restaurant could accrue from issued violations, yet it only takes 14 points to be issued a B and 28 points to be issued a C.” said Rigie.

But consumer advocate Sarah Klein says eating at a B- or C- grade restaurant is not a gamble worth taking. She’s a food attorney with the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a non-profit focused primarily on food safety issues.

“I would generally advise people not to eat at a restaurant that received lower than an A,” said Klein. “That restaurant clearly lost points for some significant violations, if they were marked all the way down to a C, and those are very real safety considerations that a consumer should take into account.”

Klein says diners who eat at Cs miss the chance to let restaurants know they need to do better. Just because you don’t get food poisoning, that doesn’t mean you should roll the dice:

“It’s like jaywalking: it’s wonderful when you make it safely to the other side of the street, but everybody agrees that under certain conditions, that could have a much worse outcome,” said Klein.

The Health Department says it will finish grading all of the city’s restaurants by the end of the year.