Uncle John's Bathroom Reader Golden Plunger Awards (15 page)

Types of insects that people around the world eat include ants, beetles, caterpillars, cockroaches, crickets, grasshoppers, earthworms, fly larvae, bees, mealworms, may flies, moths, rolli-pollies, silverfish, termites, water bugs, and wasps. They all have distinctive flavors. Male giant water bugs have a minty taste; leaf-cutting ants have a walnut flavor; fire-ant pupae taste like watermelon; and many grubs taste sweet and creamy.

These varied flavors were highlighted in a menu from a New York Entomological Society “Bug Banquet” held at the Explorers Club:

Most authorities (both entomologists and chefs) recommend that would-be entomophages stick to farmed insects. Not only are they disease-free—they’re more likely to be toxin-free, too.

You’ve been reading along, and you’re probably still squirming. You’d never go near a fire-roasted tarantula, or coconut-milk-marinated grubs. On the other hand, maybe you would. Most people already eat shrimp and lobster, which are arthropods, just like insects. They stir honey, an insect-made sweetener, into their tea. And although only a few of us have eaten one, we’ve all heard of the agave worm at the bottom of a tequila bottle.

Still not convinced that “mixed-bug” products are for you? Well, like it or not, you’ve already been consuming them. The FDA doesn’t ban insect parts in our food, because that would be—well—impossible. Insects are present in many different foodstuffs, especially grains. (Sacks of rice always include rice weevils.) One Ohio University resource on unintentional entomophagy estimates that people eat the equivalent of one to two pounds of insects a year. Regulatory agencies around the world do try to limit the acceptable quantities of insect parts in food. For example, 100 grams of chocolate can contain up to 60 insect fragments. We needn’t go on. You’re already an entomophage.

Geocaching

Most of us can’t dive for Spanish gold and sunken treasure on shipwrecks, but plenty of people comb beaches and fields with metal detectors, hoping to stumble on something valuable. But there’s an opportunity to search for treasure that you may not have known about—geocaching. Geocaching is an activity that combines new technology—a Global Positioning System (GPS)—with old-fashioned fun, and a chance to find hidden caches of trinkets and other items.

Geocaching has an oddball predecessor: the “sport” of letterboxing, which has been around for more than a century and a half. Letterboxing began on England’s lonely moors, specifically at Dartmoor’s Cranmere Pool in 1854, when a Victorian tour guide named James Perrott left a bottle there to collect people’s notes and letters.

It took a while for Perrott’s idea to catch on—the next message didn’t appear for 40 years, and the third for another 44! But once people did catch on, they started making the letters more and more elaborate, and then began hiding the letterboxes to make searching for the container part of the fun. By the 1970s, letterboxing had morphed into a combination of orienteering, puzzle, and craft, as serious hikers looked farther, wider, and harder for hidden boxes, and filled them with elaborately designed letters, poems, maps, and drawings. At this point, letterboxers decided that their sport needed a Code of Conduct so that the natural
landscape, historic sites, and landowners wouldn’t be disturbed. The job fell to an Englishman named Godfrey “God” Swinscow, who drafted the following rules, which remain in place today:

After an article about letterboxing appeared in a 1998 issue of
Smithsonian
magazine, the activity gained popularity in the United States and adopted new technology and a new name: geocaching. On May 2, 2000, selective availability became “open” for all GPS units, meaning that anyone could precisely pinpoint a location. Tech enthusiasts wasted no time finding interesting ways to use this technology . . . and geocaching was one of them.

Originally called “GPS stash hunting” (the name change was suggested to avoid the negative drug-related connotation of “stash”), the game involves burying a geocache—a small (waterproof) container that holds a logbook and trinkets—for other people to find using their GPS.

A typical hunt works like this:

Some types of geocaching treasures are themselves trackable. Travel Bugs and GeoCoins are among the most popular. Travel Bugs are tags (they look like dog tags) with an embedded electronic chip, and they’re usually attached to a “treasure” (a plastic doll, for example).

GeoCoins are silver-dollar-sized disks with embedded chips that have become collector’s items in their own right and often include some kind of logo or insignia.

Travel Bugs and GeoCoins aren’t meant to be kept; they’re meant to be found and moved to another cache. That way, geocache enthusiasts can track them online and see where the items have been, where they’re heading, and sometimes even some information about the finders.

Just as there are lots of different kinds of “treasure,” there are lots of different hiding places for caches. Some are easy to track, others are more hidden. Some are even meant to be located at night, with the help of flashlights to find reflectors.

One “cool cache” identified by
Today’s Cacher
magazine is North Carolina’s “Tube Torcher.” Hunters of this geocache are encouraged to bring “flashlights, climbing harness with carabiner and safety rope, gloves, and kneepads”—whew! This requires a
lot more energy than combing a beach, but it’s also a lot more fun.

There are different kinds of caches, too:

Traditional:
There’s always at least a container (usually waterproof) and a log book. Some “microcaches” are tiny plastic bags or tubes that have just a log sheet inside of them.

Multi-Cache (or Offset Cache):
These can have two sites or more. The first cache contains clues to the one with the log book and treasure.

Mystery or Puzzle Cache:
A mystery cache includes some clues that a participant must solve in order to find the cache’s location.

Letterbox Hybrid:
To find these, seekers use clues (like the old art of letterboxing) instead of GPS coordinates.

Event Cache:
Local geocachers often get together to discuss the sport and go on group hunts.

Mega-Event Cache:
An event cache with 500 or more people.

Cache In, Trash Out:
A type of Event Cache that includes cleaning up trails and areas while caching.

EarthCache:
Instead of finding treasure, cachers find information about geosciences, the earth, or the area where the cache is located.

GPS Adventures Maze Exhibit:
A traveling exhibit that helps teach people about geocaching.

Geocaching hasn’t even been around for a decade, but the technology that has made it possible has increased the community of geocaching fans. Because it would be easy for a cache to be stolen or vandalized, most geocachers abide by a code of ethics involving being safe, considerate, and honest. At sites like GeoCaching. com, players can find cache lists, discuss the activity, and download coordinates so they can engage in completely paperless geocaching.

 

Ready, set . . . search!

Colorful Squirrel Towns

Most unusual subject of regional competition in the United States? Squirrels . . . Yes, squirrels. The bushy-tailed rodents have inspired fierce competition in quite a few towns, based not on usefulness (most people regard them as vermin) or rarity (every suburban yard has a few), but on color. Brown and grey squirrels need not apply.

Squirrels adapted to their habitats by turning brown and grey to camouflage themselves from predators or their prey (squirrels are omnivores). But in several towns around the country, white squirrels flourish. The Albino Squirrel Preservation Society (ASPS) has nine campus chapters, including its founding group at the University of Texas at Austin. And although the ASPS chapters vary in their amount and constancy of activity, their mission—to help save and foster albino squirrel populations—is shared by the towns that proudly claim white squirrels as their mascots, too.

Five towns use white squirrels as their calling card, but only two—Olney, Illinois, and Kenton, Tennessee—claim to have populations of true albino squirrels—meaning the animals have little or no melanin pigment in their hair and eyes.

1.
In Olney, there are two opposing theories about how the little white ones came to town, though both arrived around the turn of the 20th century:

Either way, Olney is proud of its usual wildlife. The town bills itself as “Home of the White Squirrel,” and local police wear a shoulder patch with a white squirrel logo.

2.
Olney claims its white squirrels are the only true albinos, but Kenton, Tennessee, residents disagree and claim their squirrels are the true albinos. Kentonians also say that their white squirrels are the oldest U.S. population, having escaped from a gypsy caravan around 1869. When asked where the other town’s white squirrel populations came from, Kentonians imply theirs was the source.

3.
Marionville, Missouri, also uses the slogan “Home of the White Squirrel.” People there acknowledge that the town’s white squirrels are not albinos, but residents suggest that Olney’s squirrels are descendants of white squirrels stolen from Marionville.