Reader Mail!: We Will Teach You All About Chapulines, Young Grasshopper

One of our Guanabooboos, Alfonso, is set on preparing chapulines. We featured a recipe that included dried grasshoppers back in August - a recipe so popular it received thousands of comments from delighted readers. Here's Alfonso's email:

I want to prepare chapulines however, I don't know if it's okay to use other speices of grasshoppers; there are some large and small ones with different colors in my area. Do you know if that's okay? Also, I would like to know if there are sites or stores that sell them in lar ge quantities. I thought of breeding them myself but I have to figure out what they truly eat. I'll appriciate your help. It can be very difficult for me to find exactly what I'm looking for when I searched for live grasshoppers very thouroughly on the net. [sic]

We would suggest that instead of eating grasshoppers found in your yard or buying live grasshoppers -- usually reserved for feeding pets -- that you order dried grasshoppers online or buy them at a speciality food store. Not all grasshoppers are edible and attempting to consume grasshoppers you've caught yourself can result in making yourself sick, some being toxic or containing relatively high levels of lead. Some examples of grasshoppers that are ok to eat include red locusts, brown locusts, the green tree locust and the garden locust. Make sure to stay away from foam grasshoppers, which typically feed on milkweed - a plant that is toxic when consumed by humans. Foam grasshoppers are named as such because, when threatened, they exude these milkweed toxins in a foam from their thoracic joints. Which may result in extreme unpleasantness. Or death. So your best bet, Alfonso, is to buy them in dried form, soak them before cooking and prepare in accordance to the recipe of your choosing. We recommend trying Rainbow Mealworms. Alternately, you can try finding a Mexican or Thai restaurant near you that serves dishes made with grasshoppers and ask them where they buy their bugs. Enviro Perspectives with Dave Rushworth [Kruger Park]