Best Food Writing 2014 (51 page)

Bun's sack is bigger than mine, of course, and Roman has also done well. We kick over to Bun's boat and offload our contents, and suddenly the cooler won't even close. The shore crabs from last night use the mussels as scaffolding to make a break for it, skulking around the boat, hiding in corners and waiting for a change in their fortunes.

A vision of invasive miso soup begins to dance in our heads as the evening sun cracks like an egg along the northwest horizon and we pilot the Bunboat up the sound. We have seaweeds, we have shellfish, we have seawater, we just so happen to have a giant wok and a propane tank, and we have nowhere to be. But we need clams.

We steal into a cove rimmed by a 20-foot wall of rock on one side and Connecticut McMansions on the other. We tie up to somebody else's mooring ball. At the bottom of the cove, Bun suspects, lurk quahogs (native but underutilized, at least by these Gatsbys).

“How will I know?” I ask.

“Just dive to the bottom and feel around.”

“How deep is it?”

“Only one way to find out.”

Right. Pale white faces peek out of upper-story windows and gardeners pause in mid-rake to watch the frogmen deploy. I fill my lungs with air and kick straight for Hades, my hands reached out in front, down, down into darkness.

Just about the time the vise is closing on my temples and I'm wondering if I have enough air for the return trip, my hands plunge into mud and almost instantly close on what feel like smooth, fist-sized rocks. I grab as many as I can and kick hard for the surface and explode into air, clutching handfuls of glossy black
Mercenaria mercenaria
. Then Bun shoots up with even bigger ones, and the quahog hunt is on. We are rooting in the mud like manatees, filling our sacks with clams and gasping for air in between. Eventually, I struggle back to the boat with a sack that feels as if it is full of bowling balls.

Half an hour later, we have commandeered an island of pink rock in the middle of the sound and chased the oystercatchers away. The burner under the wok is roaring like a jet engine, and shore crabs are dancing in dark sesame oil. Bun adds ginger, garlic, periwinkles, and dead man's fingers and cooks it down into a mushy green marine bruschetta. The other seaweeds, clams, and tunicate-crusted mussels go into a separate wok with a little seawater and miso paste. Soon the tunicates slide off the shells and dissolve into an orange bisque, and suddenly we have New Haven miso soup.

As the color fades from the sky and the day's heat radiates from the rock, we spoon out bowlfuls of soup swirling with green, brown, and red seaweeds, clacking with shells, and salted by the sea. There's also a fair amount of the bottom of Long Island Sound in the soup, grit and tunicate grinding between our molars, but hey, this is war.

And I now feel that it's a war we can win. Who could stop this Chinese-Japanese-American hero for our times, stirring a wok in his Hawaiian-print bathing suit and popping boiling crabs into his mouth? He and Roman have book projects in the works, online plans, speaking gigs, and I foresee a thousand invasivore clubs spreading across the land—not Miya's exactly, more like Bun's After Dark, an uprising of scrappy locals going all MMA on the invaders. Wherever the kingdom is threatened, we will be waiting with our chopsticks. For we are hungry. We are open-minded. And we are legion.

T
here are nearly nineteen hundred recorded edible insect species on Earth and counting. How many different types of meat have you sampled in your lifetime? Most people never go beyond the standard dozen-plus basics of chicken, beef, pork, lamb, and maybe five to ten kinds of fish. Compared with the 500 varieties of insect eaten in Mexico alone, this is a fairly limited flavor palate—the “beginner box” of culinary Crayolas.

Insects represent the majority of the animal biomass on Earth. They have thousands of different habitats, and many species have evolved to eat a single type of plant. Considering all the different plants and ecosystems there are, and their corresponding insect populations, this opens up a kaleidoscope of flavors.

In general, insects tend to taste a bit nutty, especially when roasted. This comes from the natural fats they contain, combined with the crunchiness of their mineral-rich exoskeletons. Crickets, for instance, taste like nutty shrimp, whereas most larvae I've tried have a nutty mushroom flavor. My two favorites, wax moth caterpillars (a.k.a. wax worms) and bee larvae, taste like enoki-pine nut and bacon-chanterelle, respectively.

Recently, when I served this grub at the LA Natural History Museum's Bug Fair Cook-Off,
*
one kid on the judging panel said my “Alice in Wonderland” dish of sautéed wax worms and oyster mushrooms tasted like macaroni and cheese, while the rest agreed that my Bee-LT Sandwich tasted like it was made with real bacon.

The term “bug” has a specific taxonomic meaning, indicating an insect of the order Hemiptera, known as the “true bugs,” and includes cicadas, aphids, plant hoppers, leafhoppers, shield bugs, and others. It is also widely used by non-entomologists as an umbrella term covering land arthropods in general, including arachnids like scorpions and spiders.

Having established that arachnids are included in our general discussion of entomophagy, their tastes should be included as well. In my experience, arachnids often taste like a light, earthy version of shellfish, crab, and lobster in particular. This makes sense since, from a biological standpoint, bugs and crustaceans are quite closely related. However, the air-breathing group of these invertebrates has one distinct advantage over its sea-steeped brethren: They aren't bottom-feeders. Scorpions, tarantulas, and other edible arachnids all catch their prey live, unlike crabs, which are just as happy to feast on detritus.

These examples are fairly tame and recognizable; most people can swallow the idea of nutty mushrooms and earthy shellfish. But there are also flavors in the bug world that can hardly be equated with anything familiar to most Westerners. The taste of giant water bug practically defies description; as one writer enthused after his first time eating them, “There is simply nothing in the annals of our culture to which I can direct your attention that would hint at the nature of [its] flavor.”

When fresh, these aggressive beetles have a scent like a crisp green apple. Large enough to yield tiny fillets, they taste like anchovies soaked in banana-rose brine, with the consistency of a light, flaky fish. Dave Gracer likes to serve tiny filaments of their flesh atop cubes of watermelon, and even this minuscule amount of the bug is enough to infuse an entire mouthful. It's no wonder their extract is a common ingredient in Thai sauces.

Conservative eaters are likely to prefer to stick to what they know, but if you're anything like me, you'll find this galaxy of mysterious new flavors simply too compelling to resist. Indeed, some of the world's top gastronauts have begun to explore it in earnest.

Noma is the much-buzzed-about restaurant in Copenhagen, Denmark, that beat out elBulli for
Restaurant
magazine's best restaurant in the world award in 2010 and has managed to hold on to the title for three years running. A tiny place on the waterfront edge of an old stone maritime warehouse, the restaurant's trappings are so subtle you'd miss it if you weren't really looking. Yet Noma turned down close to a million would-be diners in the last year alone. From its windows, the city skyline, with its slender church spires and geometric modern architecture, is silhouetted so beautifully in the pinkening sunset that famous head chef René Redzepi comes out to snap a quick photo, then ducks back in before becoming the subject of photos himself. Redzepi was recently named one of
Time
magazine's World's 100 Most Influential People.

Ten years ago, Copenhagen was virtually unknown as far as food went, a “culinary backwater,” as Michael Booth called it in
Copenhagen Encounter
. In other words, no one went to Denmark for the food, unless they had a hankering for reindeer meat. Today people fly from all over the world to sample aspects of the fiercely home-proud food movement that has flourished here, known as the New Nordic Cuisine, largely established by Redzepi and his Noma cofounder, Claus Meyer.

Redzepi's perspective on the New Nordic Cuisine has extended its tentacles to gourmets around the world as chefs strive to imitate his style, for which intrepid diners pay $400 apiece to eat things like fried reindeer moss, hay ash, twigs, ants and seaweed. This may sound like the world's biggest rip-off, but the idea is that one is eating, well, ideas taken from nature, refined through art and tradition, and re-presented as nature on the plate.

“The flavors at Noma are intense. They're not for everyone,” Daniel Giusti, the former chef of 1789 in Washington, DC, now a soldier in Redzepi's army, told the
Washington Post
. “There's an aura about this restaurant that I've never seen before. René can do anything he wants.”

The New Nordic Cuisine is about the fusion of immediacy and history at once. It's about what is available locally, seasonally, and, generally, in abundance—the here and now of nutrient sources. It's also about the identity of a place, both naturally and culturally. In the Nordic region—which comprises Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Sweden, the Faroe Islands, Greenland, Svalbard, and Åland—food preservation techniques like fermenting and pickling have been popular for centuries, likely because of the percentage of the year spent in cold, dark winter. Food has to last, to warm, to nourish deeply—but also to inspire and invigorate during the long, lightless months. Ingredients can be extended but also intensified through the application of salt, yeasts, mold, and time.

This is all the easier to grasp now in the beginning of November, when it's already so cold I have to wear two jackets, gloves, and a thick hat at all times. I'm here in Copenhagen to visit Nordic Food Lab (NFL), the R&D branch of Noma.

Taking humble ingredients and elevating them to a lofty status is Redzepi's proven specialty. In early 2012, he posed the question: If he could serve bark, branches, weeds, and other dubiously edible ingredients at Noma, why couldn't he serve the humblest ingredient of all—insects?

He tasked NFL, the nonprofit institute he established and then dedicated to searching and stretching the boundaries of edibility, with discovering the answer. Since then, they've been experimenting with various species, trying to find the most delicious ways of presenting ingredients viewed as nonedible by the public.

Docked just across the cold black canal is NFL's floating houseboat of a home. Like Noma, it has an unassuming exterior—a small gray boat surrounded by bicycles. Much has been written about the relatively small expanse bracketed by Noma and NFL. But no one has written about their foray into edible insects.

I show up bright and early in the chilly rain. The boat looks cozy and inviting, with its squares of warm yellow glass gleaming against the gray; a clean, well-lighted place for cooks. I make it onto the boat's front porch, where I hover in front of the glass doors and wave.

A handful of edgily stylish, serious-looking men, each with his own air of focused intensity, ushers me inside. There's somber Michael Bom Frost, who splits his time between being director of NFL
and director of studies for the Gastronomy and Health program at Copenhagen University. Next is animated Scotsman Benedict Reade, the new head of culinary research and development, followed by stoic, tattooed Lars Williams, Ben's predecessor and current R&D director at Noma, and keen-eyed Josh Evans, an intern from Yale Sustainable Food Project. These guys help dream up and then test some of the most innovative food ideas in the world. I peel off my wet layers in the warmth of the space, which is spare yet welcoming like many Danish interiors. The room is part designer kitchen, part laboratory, part casually elegant meeting space. Stacks of beakers and flasks coexist with pots and pans. Containers holding various colors and consistencies have labels like BEETS, BREAD YEAST 11/09 and SORREL, RED WINE, BARLEY MOLD 02/07. It looks like exactly what it is: a preternaturally hip foodie think tank.