The fresh tacos served by Don Bugito in San Francisco are delicious:

Monica Martinez plans to start an insect food cart in San Francisco through an incubator that helps mainly women and immigrant food entrepreneurs start up businesses. Ms. Martinez wants to feature insect dishes based on Hispanic foods but grown locally, such as a ceviche-like cricket dish and soft tortilla tacos with meal worms and green salsa

I am told worms are far more sustainable source of nutrition, with “protein content as much as twice that of beef“; and they are a “centuries-old” traditional meal. Above all that context I was hungry, so I didn’t mind buying them for lunch.

As I munched down my second worm taco on the street a cameraman walked up and said he needed a quote from my mealy mouth for an AP story.

I stared into the camera and said “…much better than meat!”

I wonder if the footage will pop up somewhere.

Later I realized I should have said something more like “feels great to be the early bird” or “I guess now I know what it’s like to have baited breath” or “it doesn’t bug me at all” or “tastes like butter…fly” or “finally, here’s some global worming we can feel good about”.

Anyway, they really are delicious without needing much more thought.

Update: Insect cuisine puts a whole new spin on agricultural risk management.

Farmers on the outskirts of Mexico City were spending large amounts of money on pesticides to kill grasshoppers, Garcia Oviedo said, until they found they could get more money for the edible bugs than for their crops.

“Now, these farmers are planting a cheap kind of corn, just to serve as a trap to catch grasshoppers,” he noted. “They’ve seen that it’s better to have a crop with pests.”

Better to have pests? Now that’s a twist.