• Mmmm insects. Some eat them outright, some ground them up into meals, and some grow their own for eating.
• For Northern Italian fare, try Vancouver's La Quercia.
• With the lunch meat crisis, what on earth is left to feed the kids in this no-peanut butter age?
• Go here for a list of wild foods that are currently in their prime.
• Recipes: Dave Seidler's Best Pancakes Ever, Sausage Topped Cornbread, and Julia Aitken's Braised Lamb and Lentils.
• Tasting wines, and the world of pricing.

Did you catch the guy eating toasted cicadas on The Colbert Report last night? David Gracer, a Rhode Island writing teacher, is on a quest to convince chefs to cook with insects, claiming that bugs offer more edible protein per pound than beef cattle.

Lots of cultures eat insects. I've enjoyed tiny grasshoppers, known as chapulines, in Oaxaca, Mexico. Slathered in guacamole and rolled in a tortilla, they were salty and undistinguished-tasting. Toasted and tossed with salt and chili powder, they were like corn nuts with legs. Cicadas, earthworms, crickets - bring 'em on.

Colbert was not convinced though. "I might ask one of my writers to eat a bug," he said. "Let me check their contract."

You may have sprayed garlic juice, tobacco juice, combonations thereof on your tomatoes to stave off aphids and the like...you may have sprayed any number of "organic solutions" on your precious crops. But, there is a naturally occuring compound that will not only protect your plants from unwanted insects, but for livestock as well. It's called Diatomaceous earth (DE, diatomite, diahydro) and it is a clever approach to pests. Yes I know, one plant's pest is some benign bat's snack...however, serious small-scale growers (say, tomatoes, green beans, squash, etc.) pull their hair out to keep insects nibbling on other things.

Diatomaceous earth is one good answer. It's simply a porous, chalky, white sedimentary rock composed of fossilized diatoms-- hard shelled algea. The compound absorbs the waxy outer layer of an insect's body; they die from dehydration.

DE can be used in livestock and humans, but the efficacy is low since there is no shortage of liquid in the digestive tracts of either. So, if you've run out of eco-friendly insecticide ideas, give this one a try. It doesn't smell and your plants won't mutate into super-tobacco.

We talked about chocolate-covered ants once before, but when we did, I got the impression that we were considering the tiny little guys that crawl around the patio and that end up in movies, not the so-called big-butt queen ants that are making an entry onto the gourmet foods market. "The first loud crackle tastes and feels like popcorn, but by the time the juices spray wildly in your mouth and the filament-like legs slide down your throat, there's no mistaking this toasted ant queen."

Filament-like legs? Spraying juices? Thanks - but no thanks.

These insects, called hormiga culona, are popular in Colombia, where they are gathered, and thought to have medicinal properties, including acting as an aphrodisiac and as a defense against cancer. There, they are often toasted and salted, though restaurants in the area they are harvested offer ant-spreads and ant-based sauces for their dishes. They are often given away, as the ants are not only a traditional food, but a part of the culture.

Boffins down in Australia are attempting to use the odour receptors on insects to build a 'cybernose'. They think that the power that insects have will detect aromas in minute quantities. If they manage to do this the aim is to detect wine faults - brettanomyces (smells like shit), cork taint and other faults.

Wasps - well they had to have some use - have the ability to detect individual smells at concentrations of one part per trillion. Each insect has about 60 different odour receptor proteins and by using electrical signals the inventors hope to mimick an insects behaviour.

Yesterday's New York Times featured a great account of eating a variety of insects in Thailand's Ubon province. Jennifer Gampell writes about tackling crunchy, salty fried scorpions (right), as well as grasshoppers and crickets. She passes on the large water beetles, but apparently takes a liking to a type of fly, fried with lemongrass and served in a spicy salad of chili and green papaya. Meals like this are abundant at roadside stalls in Ubon, Gampell says. The details of exactly what and where she ate are a little cloudy, however, since English names and locations seem, at times, hard to come by.

One exhibit at the Chicago BIO2006 trade show (for the world's $90 billion biotechnology industry) aims to harness the power of insects smell to improve the grape growing process.

By using an insect's acute sense of smell - which enables it to sniff out succulent grape vines - the Australian scientists plan to take the genes and turn them into electronic sensors. These will be used by grape-growers to produce tastier wines. They have several choices in how to harness the genes. They could identify how an insect's sense of smell works, and then build similar capability into an electronic chip or they could develop a "bio-chip" that incorporates needed genes into the chip itself.