This week's show is an encore.

We'll be back next week with a brand new episode.

I'm Frances Lamb, and this is The Splendid Table from APM American Public Media,

the show for curious cooks and eaters.

So when I was a kid, I remember being so grossed out by bugs.

I literally wouldn't even touch this magazine one time because I had a picture of roaches on it,

which is, you know, a little on the neurotic side, but pretty natural, right?

Or maybe my version of bugs was just a product of an arbitrary set of values and conditioning

that has little or nothing to do with how humans can choose to interact with the natural world.

Our friend, the writer and podcaster, Salejo, is fascinated by the culture of insect eating.

And she traveled to Japan to visit a village where it's all about pride,

heritage, generosity, taste, and flavor, you know, normal food stuff.

The people of Kushi Harah have an age-old obsession with wasps.

I'm talking about veskis an age-old obsession with wasps.

I'm talking about Vespula flaviceps, a species of flying insect known in central Japan

for its exquisite deliciousness. In this rural mountain village, the wasp is celebrated as a seasonal wild food, like

Matsatake mushrooms, that peaks in late autumn as their nests swell with wiggly, buttery larva.

In the west, we tend to think of entomophagy, or the eating of insects, as the domain of friendly

bugs like crickets and mealworms.

Bugs that are amenable to being processed into flowers, chips, and protein bars.

In 2013, the United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organization released a blockbuster report

that emphasized entomophagy's role in creating a sustainable source for food for our planet's growing population.

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