I thought the eyes would be the hardest. The legs look like violin bows with hair. Or are they serrated like tiny, awful knives? The torso is unsettling. It’s a dull gray-brown suit of armor. Like a dirty infant lobster. But eating eyes is uncomfortably intimate. You can see death in eyes.

Wait, no. The torso is definitely unsettling. There are bones and guts in there, right? No food marketer ever bragged, “Now with 20% more bones and guts!”

I’m looking at a plastic ramekin full of crickets at Tacos Perla in San Diego. Actually, there are no guts. These crickets have been dehydrated, deep-fried, spritzed with lemon and dusted with chiles. And for $1.50, they are food. Add them to Perla’s tacos. Eat them straight and impress/disgust your friends. Taste the future.

Because, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, this is the food of our past and our future. In 2013, the UN advocated that the world needs to start raising insects as food for both cattle and humans.

Sound gross? Well, you’re already eating bugs. The average American eats about two pounds of flies, maggots and other bugs each year.

The FDA’s Defect Levels Handbook explains it all. Frozen broccoli is legally allowed to have an average of 60 or more aphids per 100 grams. Your morning coffee? Allowed to contain up to 10 percent insect-infected or insect damaged beans. That craft beer? Hops can have 2,500 aphids per 10 grams. Peanut butter? Average of 30 or more insect fragments per 100 grams.

According to the FDA, the reason a certain amount of insects are allowed in commercial food is that it’s “economically impractical to grow, harvest or process raw products that are totally free of non-hazardous, naturally occurring, unavoidable defects.”

Granted, many foods contain far fewer insect parts than what is legally allowed. Still, it’s all but guaranteed you’re eating bugs.

And you’re not alone. Around 2 billion people eat insects across the world, according to the FAO. They’re staples in Africa, Asia and South America. The most consumed are beetles (31 percent), caterpillars (18 percent), bees, wasps and ants (14 percent), and grasshoppers, locusts and insects (13 percent).

It’s called entomophagy, or insectivory. They’ve been eaten since the dawn of time—by the entire world before the advent of hunting and farming. Raising them for food is called mini-livestock.

Why is it the future? Because world population is a real concern. We add about 200,000 people to this planet every single day, or 140 every minute, about 70 million people every year. We’re supposed to hit 9 billion people by 2050. That will require TWICE as much food as we need today. There aren’t enough burgers to feed everyone (and beef production is by far the worst agricultural action on the environment). Global wealth is increasing in countries like China and India, and they’re already out-bidding the United States for much of the “elite” proteins (just ask San Diego chefs, who each year are priced out of the local spiny lobster season because the Chinese are buying them at the docks).

Our seas are dangerously overfished. What we’re pulling out of the waters gets smaller and smaller every year. Some scientists have predicted the world’s fish could collapse during this century. Farmed fish is getting more and more effective and ecological, but it’s still not enough.

We need alternative sources of protein. Thanks to its affluence, America likely has a long while before it becomes an insect-hungry populace. But millions of Americans are food insecure. Insects are a real, economically and ecologically-friendly solution to this problem.

Insects are high in protein, good fats, iron, zinc and calcium (because you’re eating the entire body, including bones). Several studies have found insects a far more environmentally friendly source of protein than traditional livestock. Insects grow faster, take up less space, use less water, produce less ammonia. We currently use about 70% of agricultural land to raise livestock. Raising bugs uses far less acreage. Cattle takes 8 kg for 1 kg of beef, and only 40% is considered edible. It takes 1.7 kg of feed to produce one kg of insect meat and 80 percent is considered edible. Because insects are cold-blooded, they don’t use energy from feed to maintain body temperature. They can also feed on organic byproducts (animal and human waste), which reduces environmental contamination.

Some companies in the West have been making them into a powder (insect flour, cricket flour, cricket powder). Chapul was the first company to do cricket flour, selling protein bars full of the stuff. A company called Exo followed suit.

And it’s not that they should only be eaten by humans. Or maybe not even primarily. But especially as feed for traditional livestock, they’re a relatively untapped resource. Mealworms are already being farmed and used as pet food, zoos and recreational fishing.

As far as disease? It seems insects pose less threat to us than cows, pigs, and other livestock under the current production methods. Since there is a huge difference genetically between us and insects, that might also lessen the potential for disease like swine flu. It’s also something that could be done on a small scale, lowering the investment capital needed for small growers/ranchers (thus making it easier for craft crickets). It’s not as clear cut to implement this. Certain government rules and regulations need to be changed, and I won’t get into that here.

Crickets are the gateway bug. They are served at Typhoon in Santa Monica, at Sushi Mazi in Portland, and wold-famous chef Jose Andres serves them at Oyamel in D.C. In San Diego they’re sold at Perla and Escondido Mexican restaurant, El Tejate. On the wholesale side the American Cricket Ranch in San Diego is micro-ranching. San Diego Wax Worms is also raising bugs for food.

I like the future. But I can’t ignore that, as a Westerner, a ramekin full of salted crickets is the stuff of nightmares. Insects make people scream. Perla’s manager tries to get two employees to try them. Both decline, cast up-yours-I’ll-quit faces. Insects are the alien villains of horror movies. Our primal instinct is to squish them, squash them, exterminate them. Perhaps the worst of all is that they have become known in Western culture as harbingers of filth. They’re the squires of trash. Of shit!

If you have them in your kitchen, it’s a sign that you’re a pretty unclean human. It’s well-known that inside the decrepit hovel of any self-respecting serial killer, there are bugs everywhere.

In Guadalajara, Mexico, at a restaurant named La Tequila, I had a taco full of ant eggs (escamoles). Each egg, a millimeter in diameter, was covered in a gel-like white protein. I also had a taco full of agave larvae (gusanos de maguey). They looked like large, well-caramelized maggots, with hairy anuses on both ends. They were crunchy, yet let out a creaminess when bit. They were incredibly delicious, and visually and mentally disgusting.

When you put a cricket in your mouth, the first thing you feel are the legs. They feel like soft splinters. It’s simultaneously crunchy and soft, like a wet sunflower seed. Fitting, since there’s a grassy, dried-herbal flavor that tastes similar to a seedpod. At Perla, the body lets out a lemony juice. The legs crackle. As you chew, the legs and parts turn to shrapnel. I ate one 5 minutes ago and I can still feel leg parts in my mouth. Again, like a sunflower seed.

The taste is not offensive at all. More lemony than gross. But it’s definitely not what I’d call impressive. You might never crave this food in your life. The same restaurant that serves you crickets hires someone to kill their fruit flies.

But this blog on the Scientific American post makes a good point. When sushi first arrived in the US, Westerners thought eating raw fish was fairly gross. Now they pay big bucks for the opportunity.

Tacos Perla sells them because they’re a Mexican restaurant, and crickets are a delicacy in Oaxaca. And, sure, they might be doing it for the novelty as well. But whether their intentions are as noble or merely Fear Factor-ish doesn’t really matter. They’re doing their part to reduce stigma and even create some allure in trying to eat bugs.

So take a friend down to Perla. Taste the future. They serve beer, too.

A side of crickets at Tacos Perla in North Park.

The post Eating Crickets appeared first on San Diego Magazine.

Now she’s back. The Cohn Restaurant Group just hired Gubbins under the title “Special Ops: Food & Flavor.” We talked to her about what the hell that means, where she’s been, and why she went from indie favorite to corporate bigwig…

Why’d you leave Parallel 33?

I was bored. It was an eight year run. I didn’t feel challenged. There was always promise of a second spot but it never happened. I’m constantly about growth. I need to grow all day long. And I was stopping their growth. Me leaving made room for chef Ben Moore.

Everyone wants to hear about Lenny Kravitz, so I have to ask. Let’s get that question out of the way. Tell me about his underwear drawer.

We’ve been friends for 20 years. I was living in New York at his house. The whole time he was fighting to get me on his payroll. I said, “Nope. As long as I’m with you, I’m feeding you.’” I was in the studio and got to watch the tracks get laid down for his album, It’s Time for a Love Revolution. When I told him I was leaving to go back to San Diego, he took me to the Bahamas. Driving down to Miami on the bus, he played me all the raw tracks from Love Revolution. We’d listen and he’d ask me what I think. I’d say, “I don’t hear the oboe,” and he’d have [his audio engineer] bring the oboe up in the song. So I listen to it now and think, ‘Wow, he let me be a part of that.’

Seems like a decent gig. Why’d you leave?

I missed San Diego. I missed my dogs.

So you joined Specialty Produce to do what?

I helped them get their farmers market program off the ground. I did that for 18 months. I’d go to the Santa Monica Farmers Market and find the best of what they had. I’d text pictures of this amazing produce to chefs like Christian Graves (Jsix) or Antonio Friscia (Gaijin). They’d text back and say, “Cool, get me 10 pounds.”

I’ve heard the market is pretty cutthroat among buyers…

It’s super-political. I’d have to call farmers up the night before and ask them what they were bringing. They’d tell me and then I’d say, ‘OK, now what are you bringing that you’re not telling me?’

How did the Sysco thing happen?

I was in Hawaii surfing with a friend—in between jobs again—and my phone starts ringing. It’s the VP of Sysco. He said he’d like to hire me. And I’m thinking ‘Sales person? I’d be the worst sales person in the world.’ And he said, ‘No, we have this corporate chef job that helps our customers develop their menus.’

I think most people’s response to you joining Sysco was, “What? How corporate and not sexy.”

You can throw stones at the big company on the outside and flip them off. Or you can infiltrate them and figure out their culture. I tried my best. I went in there and got blue in the face talking about organics and natural meats.

So what did you do, exactly?

These mom-and-pop restaurant owners would sign up to come into my test kitchen. I’d do three a day. I’d have Indian restaurants. One day I had an Indian, Vietnamese, Italian and BBQ joint. Thank god that I loved all the different ethnic foods. I’d teach ‘em, y’know, how to make a vinaigrette. It really shaped me up to do what I’m going to do with the Cohns.

And how’d this new Cohn thing come about?

This has been a six-year courtship. We’d had conversations before and were friends. But my attitude was, ‘I’m not going to close my restaurant and come work in yours.’ I told him three years ago, ‘I know in my heart of hearts we’ll do a project together. I just don’t know what or when.’

So what exactly is “Special Ops: Food & Flavor”?

It’s going to be like what I was at Sysco, but much more intimate. I’ll work with the chefs at the new restaurants to help develop the menus. We’ll start with the new ones: Bo-Beau (in La Mesa), Zig-Zag (Oceanside), the O.B. Warehouse and Sea 180 (Imperial Beach).

Why not just call yourself corporate chef or something?

I just came from the corporate world. Official titles are not my thing. David [Cohn] told me to think about what I wanted my title to be. I was in yoga one day trying to hold this really tough inversion and not topple over and I thought, ‘I’m special opps. I roll in there, elevate the menu, roll out.’

The Cohns bring Amiko Gubbins back to S.D. restaurants.

The post THE RETURN: Amiko Gubbins appeared first on San Diego Magazine.

Crystal Pier 1927

On April 25, 1925, Ernest Pickering placed a classified ad in the San Diego Union announcing his plans to build a million-dollar pier in Pacific Beach. Pickering was no stranger to the pier business—he owned a pier in Santa Monica, but it burned down in 1924. The plan for the Pacific Beach pier was born when Earl Taylor, a local realtor, approached Pickering with the idea. Taylor needed an attraction to encourage people to purchase homes in the area. In 1927, “Pickering’s Pleasure Pier” opened to the public. Over the next 10 years, the pier would have multiple owners who would face challenges with the city. In 1936, “Crystal Pier” opened again, but the property would continue to switch hands until 1961. The pier is reportedly now owned by the locally based Allen family, who also own the 32 cottages that make up the Crystal Pier Hotel.

Built for Our Amusement

$400

Price of a home site in nearby Mission Beach in 1924

11

Number of months in advance required to reserve a Crystal Pier cottage in summer

872

Length in feet of Crystal Pier

2009

Visitors no longer need a fishing license to fish at Crystal Pier

10

Total number of piers in San Diego County

240

Feet of the pier that were ripped away by a storm in 1987

The post Vintage: Crystal Pier appeared first on San Diego Magazine.