Travels with My Ant Journal entry date: 05.25.01 © 2001 by David George Gordon This is the third in a series of field reports, filed by the world's best known bug-eater (excluding the anteater), David George Gordon. For more adventures, please visit the Index of prior reports. Further installments depicting Gordon's real-life adventures in the world of entomophagy (That's bug-eating to you) will be added as the author sees fit. Part III: Concocting Cockroach Cuisine I recently returned from my most challenging escapade -- a four-city promotional tour for the USA Network, one of the nation's largest cable TV concerns. The tour was planned to promote the premiere of They Nest, a made-for-TV movie billed as the "feel gross movie of the summer." In this intellectually stimulating program, a bunch of killer cockroaches from Africa eat the inhabitants of a small New England town. Don't you just hate when that happens? To garner media coverage for They Nest, the network recruited a PR firm from St. Louis to host cockroach-eating contests in Chicago, New York, Boston and Seattle. I was hired to help coordinate the contest and to conduct a cooking demo beforehand. By bringing me aboard, the PR firm hoped to transform an event with the life span of an adult mayfly into a crowd-pleasing two-hour extravaganza. Each contest would be held at a Major League baseball stadium -- the perfect place to attract the attention of They Nest's target audience of hormonally driven 20-year-old men. Contestants would be preselected, five in each city. The first person to clean their plateful of 20 American cockroaches (precooked, of course, by me) -- would win a check for $5,000. The second-place diners would get T-shirts. Is there no justice in this world? And there was a twist: the contestants would have their hands tied behind their backs, just like in an old-fashioned pie-eating contest. The expense of preparing for such an unusual week-long tour were daunting. Two weeks before the first scheduled stop, I ordered $1,000 worth of live bugs. Some of these petite morsels were mailed directly to the radio stations in the tour cities, along with instructions for the minimal care and feeding required. The shipping labels on these packages -- "Live Harmless Invertebrates" -- undoubtedly raised a few eyebrows enroute. Included in my food order were 450 lab-reared American cockroaches, purchased at the special price of 90 cents each (a savings of about 50 cents per bug) from the Carolina Biological Supply company of Durham, NC. Yummy! 500 marinated roaches and the insect world's answer to Julia Child. Getting ready for the gala event, in a park outside Yankee Stadium in New York. Doling out delectables, in preparation for the first of four roach-eating events. Yes, I shelled out nearly $500 for cockroaches. I know of people who pay this amount to get RID of these animals, Maybe next time we can work something out. When my styro box of roaches arrived, I quickly transferred its contents to my home freezer. A few hours later, I hand-sorted the lifeless insects, pitching any that were not in their prime. I rinsed them with tap water, and soaked their defrosted bodies in lemon juice-- a technique for dissolving the waxy cuticle that covers each bug. Then, I spread the roaches on cookie sheets, sprinkled them with a mild seasoning mix and baked them at 350 degrees. After an hour, my house reeked of eau d' cafard. But the roaches were now ready to be eaten. I cushioned the crispy critters with layers of paper towels, and loaded them into a large Tupperware container, conveniently sized to fit in my checked luggage. I stuffed a few of the live specimens into a carry-on bag, confined to unbreakable plastic containers and insulated by a few pairs of my clean socks I was ready to embark on the adventure of a lifetime... which I'll tell you all about in the next installment of Travels with My Ant.