How One University Is Successfully Tackling COVID-19

Alma Mater, a beloved bronze mother figure on the campus of the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana, wears a mask to encourage students to do the same as they return for the fall semester. Students are also expected to take a COVID-19 test twice a week.
China, South Korea and other places controlled the SARS-CoV-2 epidemic with the early use of strict lockdown and aggressive electronic contact tracing, monitoring, and enforcement.
The tussles in America over voluntary social distancing and wearing a mask in public suggest that more stringent enforcement methods adopted elsewhere would not work here. But one American university has emerged as a model of tough love pandemic management.
While many universities have become hot spots of COVID-19 infections this fall when students returned to campus, the University of Illinois was an exception. It has gotten the virus under control, at least for the moment, at a rate that is far below the national average and with minimal social disruption. Can the program they implemented work in our broader society?
The Illinois model is a comprehensive one which, as elsewhere, includes masking and social distancing, but it also requires a twice-weekly saliva test for SARS-CoV-2. All students and employees are assigned test days when they swipe their ID card and spit in a plastic tube, which is collected hourly and taken to a campus lab.
There a simplified but highly sensitive PCR genetic test goes through many cycles of amplifying the viral RNA. "Tracking three different viral RNA [genes] gives us very high accuracy," explains Martin Burke, the professor who developed the system and is monitoring its implementation at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. They immediately retest any positive sample to confirm the results, "So we think our false positive rate is extremely low. … The goal is to notify the positive person within 30 minutes of a positive test results becoming known."
Testing everyone so frequently, with a sensitive test that can quickly detect small amounts of the virus soon after infection, and isolating those who test positive before the virus can grow to volumes that make it very infectious helps the Illinois system break the chain of transmission.
"The testing we have done is not a silver bullet, it has to be done in combination with other mitigation measures. Our modeling shows that if you have masks, social distancing, and contact tracing you get a very dramatic, in fact synergistic effect with this combination,' says Burke. "So it really has to be a holistic approach with lots of community engagement in order to make this process successful."
The real teeth of enforcement are that people have to display their health status to gain access to campus facilities. A green check mark over their photo on a college ID phone app means they are good to go but a big red X means they are not current on their testing or have tested positive for the virus. Their ID is inactivated and they cannot enter campus facilities until they become compliant. Burke puts it bluntly; "We stop them from going where they want to go, a measure first used successfully with the pandemic in Wuhan, China.
He says they have learned from their experience and evolved their approach. "We never modeled for people who tested positive to ignore that result and go to or host parties, which could spread the infection." But several students did just that, and a few have been suspended for it.
So the university clamped down on enforcing isolation and now requires some higher risk persons to test three times a week to catch any infections earlier. Since more than 95 percent of new infections were among undergraduates, with no crossover from them to the local community, faculty, or graduate students, they have cut back testing of the latter two groups to just once a week.
About a thousand positive tests results have come back so far but no one has been hospitalized. Part of that likely is because the undergraduate population is largely young and healthy with few risk cofactors. But it may also be that with early identification and isolation, about five percent of dorm rooms have been set aside for that purpose, the person adopts healthier patterns of sleeping and eating that allows the immune system to better fight off the virus.
"But when you compare that to the being able to educate our students, perform research, keep our community thriving, our businesses open, if you add it all up, it's a tremendous return on investment."
The logistics are quite impressive for the campus that in ordinary times is home to more than 50,000 students; a lab capable of churning through 20,000 tests a day, with notification of results within hours, not days as is common elsewhere. And the results are equally impressive. The rate of positive test results blipped up to around 3 percent when undergraduates arrived back on campus but that has plummeted to 0.35 percent for the last seven-day period of testing, a tiny fraction of the rate for the nation as a whole. Much of it can be attributed to the closed environment with limited outside contact that might reintroduce the virus.
Still, even while the campus population has dropped by about a third, they are detecting about 250 new infections a week.
The threat of outside contact adding to the risk is why the university amended the undergraduate school calendar to close for Thanksgiving, hold final classes and exams for the semester online, and not return until February.
It doesn't come cheap. Burke estimates it cost $10 million to set up the program and about the same each semester to operate. "But when you compare that to the being able to educate our students, perform research, keep our community thriving, our businesses open, if you add it all up, it's a tremendous return on investment."
Burke acknowledges that they started with some significant advantages. The community is geographically isolated, an electronically linked ID system was already in place for students and employees, they have the ability to control much activity through access to buildings, and they can expel those who do not conform. He believes their system can translate to similar settings but admits, "A big city is very different from a university community." Still, he believes many of those lessons can be translated to different settings.
An alternative story
However, the situation is very different at the University of Colorado, where new infections have surged since undergraduates returned in late August. Administrators recently switched all classes to online only in an attempt to control the virus.
But that wasn't enough for state authorities who cracked down further, just yesterday declaring a two-week lockdown of all students aged 18 to 22, prohibiting gatherings of any size, indoors or out. Students must stay in their rooms except for essential activities, and if any symptoms develop, report for testing. Fraternities and sororities were targeted as past hot spots of infection.
The police will be actively enforcing the lockdown, and violators can face a penalty of up to 90 days in jail and a $1,000 fine.
Skepticism
Public health largely is based upon an appeal to self-interest and altruism, and voluntary compliance with official guidance. Harm reduction often comes into play when an ideal solution meets resistance and coercion plays only a limited role, as when a person with infectious tuberculosis is not compliant with treatment. Many question whether the medical threat of COVID-19 justifies such a sweeping restriction of individual rights of movement and association imposed on everyone simply because of their age and place of residence as is happening in Colorado.
State and federal courts have begun to strike down as an unconstitutional overreach some of the more restrictive decrees to stay at home or close businesses ordered by state and local officials. What was once tolerated as a few weeks or even a few months of restrictions now seems to stretch without an end in sight, and threatens peoples' livelihoods. In this litigious country it seems only a matter of time before someone will challenge some aspects of the Illinois model or similar programs being set up elsewhere as an infringement of their rights.
"I have real concerns about what we have seen over the course of the past several months in terms of going from not enough testing being available to now having more testing [available] because people don't want to be tested, even when they have symptoms," says Michael Osterholm, a noted expert on pandemic preparedness at the University of Minnesota. "We have some college campuses reporting over fifty percent of the students refusing to be tested or refusing to give any of the contacts that might be followed up on."
Often those who have tested positive for the virus "don't want people to know that they're the potential reason there could be an outbreak in their small social circle," says LaQuandra Nesbitt, public health director for Washington, DC. Stigma is one of the main reasons why only 37% of newly infected people have provided names for contact tracing in D.C., and few offer more than a single name.
"We can't test every single person every single day, we would completely go broke, we would be looking at no other health problems. We're not the NFL," says Monica Gandhi. She is a professor of medicine at the University of California San Francisco and works closely with local health officials. "Just because we have a technology doesn't mean that we have to apply it for every purpose that may be indicated. … We would never dream of mass screening the public for influenza."
"Tests don't solve the problem," she argues. Masking is the most crucial piece for Gandhi, along with social distancing, washing hands regularly, and quarantine when testing positive or in contact with someone who is. Those are the actions that break the ongoing spread of transmission. She does support regular testing in high-risk settings such as nursing homes, inpatients in hospitals, and prisons, and periodic surveys in the general population to better understand where the virus is moving.
Drawing from experience with HIV, Gandhi worries that the stigma of a positive result will drive people away from testing. "Low-income persons will be particularly hesitant to get tested, or to share contact information if they do test positive, if they think they may have to quarantine, not work or gain income." That is why San Francisco initially assisted people in isolation with payment of $1285 for two weeks of isolation and other support as part of a right to health program. And this fall, the State of California passed legislation requiring that large businesses continue to pay employees in quarantine.
Tools for self-protection
The American temperament, decentralization, size, administrative complexity, and sheer cost make it highly unlikely that a coercive one-size-fits-all Illinois approach will ever be rolled out from a university campus to the entire nation. People make different decisions in trading off between safety and personal freedom or autonomy, and many are likely to embrace a rapid, inexpensive self-test if one becomes available, much like a home pregnancy test, to proactively monitor their own health.
OraSure Technologies pioneered the first home test for HIV. It is the only over-the-counter saliva test for HIV approved for sale in the U.S. Results show in about 20 minutes. The company went on to develop versions of this test for hepatitis C and Ebola. Thus it came as no surprise when in April the Department of Health and Human Services awarded it a $710 thousand contract to develop a rapid antigen home test for SARS-CoV-2.
Initial optimization studies for the antigen test showed that a nasal sample rather than an oral one generated better results, OraSure president and CEO Stephen Tang told LeapsMag. A test using a nasal swab is expected to be available later this year while work continues to develop an antibody test that uses saliva. He says, "the fundamental challenge is not only to develop the tests but to get it to scale quickly. That's the only way it's really going to matter." The company has manufacturing capacity to produce 35 million tests a year, with about half for SARS-CoV-2, and will double that capacity in steps within the next twelve months, with all of the increased capacity dedicated to COVID-19.
Initial use will be limited to health care workers and by prescription, but the company hopes to make it available over the counter soon after the FDA finalizes its rules on these types of tests for COVID-19. Importantly, OraSure believes its nasal swab test will be able to meet the current FDA standards for at-home tests. No such tests have yet been approved.
Tang says they envision using a phone app with the test, but that's tied to "the question of our century; who owns the data? If you are an individual buying the test, are you really compelled to report to anybody? If you are an employer and you buy the test and your employees take it, are you then entitled to the information because you're the one administering the test? That's all still being debated as well" by regulators, lawyers, and ethicists.
The price hasn't been set but Tang notes that they have "vast experience" in selling directly to the consumer, physicians, and public health systems in the U.S. and in lower-income companies. "We are very aware of what the economics are and what the need is today. We're trying to make this product as widely available to as many people as possible."
Another tool that may help protect the self-motivated are cell phone apps that alert you to potential exposure to others with the virus. Apple, Google and others have developed versions of the app that all work on the same principle and, miraculously, are compatible between the Apple and Android operating system universes. At first glance they look promising.
The glitch is that where they have been available the longest, only about 15-20 percent of users bother to download it, says Bennett Cyphers, a staff technologist with the Electronic Freedom Foundation (EFF), a nonprofit that advocates for privacy and other concerns in cyberspace. He explains, "If 1 in 10 people have the app installed, then only 1 in 100 interactions between everyone is going to be captured by the app. It scales that way; the fewer people you have, then a really, really small fraction of contacts are actually detected."
It is important to remember that much of public health is not the result of policy but of what people do in their daily lives.
Importantly, about 20 percent of Americans do not own a smart phone with the capacity to handle the app; that percentage is even higher among lower income, less educated, older folks who often are most at risk for suffering a severe case of COVID-19. So the value of this tool is likely to remain largely theoretical.
Divining the future
"It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future," the great baseball sage Yogi Berra is reported to have said. Will the COVID-19 pandemic in the U.S. follow the path of Illinois or Colorado?
The recent past often is no guide to such predictions. France, Spain, and Israel once earned plaudits for early and strict enforcement of lockdowns to control spread of the virus and then eased up on those restrictions. At the same time the world watched with condemnation and fascination as Sweden chose to follow a more laissez faire approach, urging voluntary distancing and masking but no major curtailing of activity.
Today the rates of new infections of COVID-19 in the first three countries have exploded to equal or multiples of the rate in Sweden. Which approach was the correct policy? Most people say it is still too early to tell for sure. The same can be said for the examples of Illinois and Colorado.
And then there is the puzzling example of Manaus, the Brazilian city of 1.8 million in the middle of the Amazon which was slammed with infections as hard as New York City; without the medical infrastructure to cope with the virus, 4000 have died. But then, suddenly, new infections began to taper off, and nobody claims to understand why, it certainly wasn't because official policies changed. One guess is that perhaps the region reached herd immunity, but that is simply speculation.
One can pick and choose examples of tough enforcement of quarantine or none to prove their point for the short term. But draconian measures will not be tolerated for long in a free society, and there is no clear, overwhelming evidence that over the long run one policy approach works better than another.
It is important to remember that much of public health is not the result of policy but of what people do in their daily lives. We have come remarkably far in what is still only months since we first heard the name of the virus. Death rates have fallen dramatically as we have learned how to better manage severe disease, often by adapting treatments for other diseases. And there is reason for optimism with the large number of vaccine candidates already in human trials.
We also have learned that we can control much of our own fate through simple but concerted actions in our daily lives such as social distancing, wearing masks, and washing hands. Let's not only remember those facts, but practice them.
Interventions in health and safety often yield results that are the opposite of what policymakers were hoping for. Officials can take a science-based approach by measuring what really works instead of relying on gut intuitions.
You are driving along the highway and see an electronic sign that reads: “3,238 traffic deaths this year.” Do you think this reminder of roadside mortality would change how you drive? According to a recent, peer-reviewed study in Science, seeing that sign would make you more likely to crash. That’s ironic, given that the sign’s creators assumed it would make you safer.
The study, led by a pair of economists at the University of Toronto and University of Minnesota, examined seven years of traffic accident data from 880 electric highway sign locations in Texas, which experienced 4,480 fatalities in 2021. For one week of each month, the Texas Department of Transportation posts the latest fatality messages on signs along select traffic corridors as part of a safety campaign. Their logic is simple: Tell people to drive with care by reminding them of the dangers on the road.
But when the researchers looked at the data, they found that the number of crashes increased by 1.52 percent within three miles of these signs when compared with the same locations during the same month in previous years when signs did not show fatality information. That impact is similar to raising the speed limit by four miles or decreasing the number of highway troopers by 10 percent.
The scientists calculated that these messages contributed to 2,600 additional crashes and 16 deaths annually. They also found a social cost, meaning the financial expense borne by society as a whole due to these crashes, of $377 million per year, in Texas alone.
The cause, they argue, is distracted driving. Much like incoming texts or phone calls, these “in-your-face” messages grab your attention and undermine your focus on the road. The signs are particularly distracting and dangerous because, in communicating that many people died doing exactly what you are doing, they cause anxiety. Supporting this hypothesis, the scientists discovered that crashes increase when the signs report higher numbers of deaths. Thus, later in the year, as that total mortality figure goes up, so do the percentage of crashes.
Boomerang effects happen when those with authority, in government or business, fail to pay attention to the science. These leaders rely on armchair psychology and gut intuitions on what should work, rather than measuring what does work.
That change over time is not simply a function of changing weather, the study’s authors observed. They also found that the increase in car crashes is greatest in more complex road segments, which require greater focus to navigate.
The overall findings represent what behavioral scientists like myself call a “boomerang effect,” meaning an intervention that produces consequences opposite to those intended. Unfortunately, these effects are all too common. Between 1998 and 2004, Congress funded the $1 billion National Youth Anti-Drug Media Campaign, which famously boomeranged. Using professional advertising and public relations firms, the campaign bombarded kids aged 9 to 18 with anti-drug messaging, focused on marijuana, on TV, radio, magazines, and websites. A 2008 study funded by the National Institutes of Health found that children and teens saw these ads two to three times per week. However, more exposure to this advertising increased the likelihood that youth used marijuana. Why? Surveys and interviews suggested that young people who saw the ads got the impression that many of their peers used marijuana. As a result, they became more likely to use the drug themselves.
Boomerang effects happen when those with authority, in government or business, fail to pay attention to the science. These leaders rely on armchair psychology and gut intuitions on what should work, rather than measuring what does work.
To be clear, message campaigns—whether on electronic signs or through advertisements—can have a substantial effect on behavior. Extensive research reveals that people can be influenced by “nudges,” which shape the environment to influence their behavior in a predictable manner. For example, a successful campaign to reduce car accidents involved sending smartphone notifications that helped drivers evaluate their performance after each trip. These messages informed drivers of their personal average and best performance, as measured by accelerometers and gyroscopes. The campaign, which ran over 21 months, significantly reduced accident frequency.
Nudges work best when rigorously tested with small-scale experiments that evaluate their impact. Because behavioral scientists are infrequently consulted in creating these policies, some studies suggest that only 62 percent have a statistically significant effect. Other research reveals that up to 15 percent of desired interventions may backfire.
In the case of roadside mortality signage, the data are damning. The new research based on the Texas signs aligns with several past studies. For instance, research has shown that increasing people’s anxiety causes them to drive worse. Another, a Virginia Tech study in a laboratory setting, found that showing drivers fatality messages increased what psychologists call “cognitive load,” or the amount of information your brain is processing, with emotionally-salient information being especially burdensome and preoccupying, thus causing more distraction.
Nonetheless, Texas, along with at least 28 other states, has pursued mortality messaging campaigns since 2012, without testing them effectively. Behavioral science is critical here: when road signs are tested by people without expertise in how minds work, the results are often counterproductive. For example, the Virginia Tech research looked at road signs that used humor, popular culture, sports, and other nontraditional themes with the goal of provoking an emotional response. When they measured how participants responded to these signs, they noticed greater cognitive activation and attention in the brain. Thus, the researchers decided, the signs worked. But a behavioral scientist would note that increased attention likely contributes to the signs’ failure. As the just-published study in Science makes clear, distracting, emotionally-loaded signs are dangerous to drivers.
But there is good news. First, in most cases, it’s very doable to run an effective small-scale study testing an intervention. States could set up a safety campaign with a few electric signs in a diversity of settings and evaluate the impact over three months on driver crashes after seeing the signs. Policymakers could ask researchers to track the data as they run ads for a few months in a variety of nationally representative markets for a few months and assess their effectiveness. They could also ask behavioral scientists whether their proposals are well designed, whether similar policies have been tried previously in other places, and how these policies have worked in practice.
Everyday citizens can write to and call their elected officials to ask them to make this kind of research a priority before embracing an untested safety campaign. More broadly, you can encourage them to avoid relying on armchair psychology and to test their intuitions before deploying initiatives that might place the public under threat.
Why we should put insects on the menu
Insects for sale at a market in Cambodia.
I walked through the Dong Makkhai forest-products market, just outside of Vientiane, the laid-back capital of the Lao Peoples Democratic Republic or Lao PDR. Piled on rough display tables were varieties of six-legged wildlife–grasshoppers, small white crickets, house crickets, mole crickets, wasps, wasp eggs and larvae, dragonflies, and dung beetles. Some were roasted or fried, but in a few cases, still alive and scrabbling at the bottom of deep plastic bowls. I crunched on some fried crickets and larvae.
One stall offered Giant Asian hornets, both babies and adults. I suppressed my inner squirm and, in the interests of world food security and equity, accepted an offer of the soft, velvety larva; they were smooth on the tongue and of a pleasantly cool, buttery-custard consistency. Because the seller had already given me a free sample, I felt obliged to buy a chunk of the nest with larvae and some dead adults, which the seller mixed with kaffir lime leaves.
The year was 2016 and I was in Lao PDR because Veterinarians without Borders/Vétérinaires sans Frontières-Canada had initiated a project on small-scale cricket farming. The intent was to organize and encourage rural women to grow crickets as a source of supplementary protein and sell them at the market for cash. As a veterinary epidemiologist, I had been trained to exterminate disease spreading insects—Lyme disease-carrying ticks, kissing bugs that carry American Sleeping Sickness and mosquitoes carrying malaria, West Nile and Zika. Now, as part of a global wave promoting insects as a sustainable food source, I was being asked to view arthropods as micro-livestock, and devise management methods to keep them alive and healthy. It was a bit of a mind-bender.
The 21st century wave of entomophagy, or insect eating, first surged in the early 2010s, promoted by a research centre in Wageningen, a university in the Netherlands, conferences organized by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, and enthusiastic endorsements by culinary adventurers and celebrities from Europeanized cultures. Headlines announced that two billion people around the world already ate insects, and that if everyone adopted entomophagy we could reduce greenhouse gases, mitigate climate change, and reign in profligate land and water use associated with industrial livestock production.
Furthermore, eating insects was better for human health than eating beef. If we were going to feed the estimated nine billion people with whom we will share the earth in 2050, we would need to make some radical changes in our agriculture and food systems. As one author proclaimed, entomophagy presented us with a last great chance to save the planet.
In 2010, in Kunming, a friend had served me deep-fried bamboo worms. I ate them to be polite. They tasted like French fries, but with heads.
The more recent data suggests that the number of people who eat insects in various forms, though sizeable, may be closer to several hundreds of millions. I knew that from several decades of international veterinary work. Sometimes, for me, insect eating has been simply a way of acknowledging cultural diversity. In 2010, in Kunming, a friend had served me deep-fried bamboo worms. I ate them to be polite. They tasted like French fries, but with heads. My friend said he preferred them chewier. I never thought about them much after that. I certainly had not thought about them as ingredients for human health.
Is consuming insects good for human health? Researchers over the past decade have begun to tease that apart. Some think it might not be useful to use the all-encompassing term insect at all; we don’t lump cows, pigs, chickens into one culinary category. Which insects are we talking about? What are they fed? Were they farmed or foraged? Which stages of the insects are we eating? Do we eat them directly or roasted and ground up?
The overall research indicates that, in general, the usual farmed insects (crickets, locusts, mealworms, soldier fly larvae) have high levels of protein and other important nutrients. If insects are foraged by small groups in Laos, they provide excellent food supplements. Large scale foraging in response to global markets can be incredibly destructive, but soldier fly larvae fed on food waste and used as a substitute for ground up anchovies for farmed fish (as Enterra Feed in Canada does) improves ecological sustainability.
Entomophagy alone might not save the planet, but it does give us an unprecedented opportunity to rethink how we produce and harvest protein.
The author enjoys insects from the Dong Makkhai forest-products market, just outside of Vientiane, the capital of the Lao Peoples Democratic Republic.
David Waltner-Toews
Between 1961 and 2018, world chicken production increased from 4 billion to 20 billion, pork from 200 million to over 100 billion pigs, human populations doubled from 3.5 billion to more than 7 billion, and life expectancy (on average) from 52 to 72 years. These dramatic increases in food production are the result of narrowly focused scientific studies, identifying specific nutrients, antibiotics, vaccines and genetics. What has been missing is any sort of peripheral vision: what are the unintended consequences of our narrowly defined success?
If we look more broadly, we can see that this narrowly defined success led to industrial farming, which caused wealth, health and labor inequities; polluted the environment; and created grounds for disease outbreaks. Recent generations of Europeanized people inherited the ideas of eating cows, pigs and chickens, along with their products, so we were focused only on growing them as efficiently as possible. With insects, we have an exciting chance to start from scratch. Because, for Europeanized people, insect eating is so strange, we are given the chance to reimagine our whole food system in consultation with local experts in Asia and Africa (many of them villagers), and to bring together the best of both locally adapted food production and global distribution.
For this to happen, we will need to change the dietary habits of the big meat eaters. How can we get accustomed to eating bugs? There’s no one answer, but there are a few ways. In many cases, insects are ground up and added as protein supplements to foods like crackers or bars. In certain restaurants, the chefs want you to get used to seeing the bugs as you eat them. At Le Feston Nu in Paris, the Arlo Guthrie look-alike bartender poured me a beer and brought out five small plates, each featuring a different insect in a nest of figs, sun-dried tomatoes, raisins, and chopped dried tropical fruits: buffalo worms, crickets, large grasshoppers (all just crunchy and no strong flavour, maybe a little nutty), small black ants (sour bite), and fat grubs with a beak, which I later identified as palm weevil larvae, tasting a bit like dried figs.
Some entomophagy advertising has used esthetically pleasing presentations in classy restaurants. In London, at the Archipelago restaurant, I dined on Summer Nights (pan fried chermoula crickets, quinoa, spinach and dried fruit), Love-Bug Salad (baby greens with an accompanying dish of zingy, crunchy mealworms fried in olive oil, chilis, lemon grass, and garlic), Bushman’s Cavi-Err (caramel mealworms, bilinis, coconut cream and vodka jelly), and Medieaval Hive (brown butter ice cream, honey and butter caramel sauce and a baby bee drone).
The Archipelago restaurant in London serves up a Love-Bug Salad: baby greens with an accompanying dish of zingy, crunchy mealworms fried in olive oil, chilis, lemon grass, and garlic.
David Waltner-Toews
Some chefs, like Tokyo-based Shoichi Uchiyama, try to entice people with sidewalk cooking lessons. Uchiyama's menu included hornet larvae, silkworm pupae, and silkworms. The silkworm pupae were white and pink and yellow. We snipped off the ends and the larvae dropped out. My friend Zen Kawabata roasted them in a small pan over a camp stove in the street to get the "chaff" off. We made tea from the feces of worms that had fed on cherry blossoms—the tea smelled of the blossoms. One of Uchiyama-san’s assistants made noodles from buckwheat dough that included powdered whole bees.
At a book reading in a Tokyo bookstore, someone handed me a copy of the Japanese celebrity scandal magazine Friday, opened to an article celebrating the “charms of insect eating.” In a photo, scantily-clad girls were drinking vodka and nibbling giant water bugs dubbed as toe-biters, along with pickled and fried locusts and butterfly larvae. If celebrities embraced bug-eating, others might follow. When asked to prepare an article on entomophagy for the high fashion Sorbet Magazine, I started by describing a clip of Nicole Kidman delicately snacking on insects.
Taking a page from the success story of MacDonald’s, we might consider targeting children and school lunches. Kids don’t lug around the same dietary baggage as the grownups, and they can carry forward new eating habits for the long term. When I offered roasted crickets to my grandchildren, they scarfed them down. I asked my five-year-old granddaughter what she thought: she preferred the mealworms to the crickets – they didn’t have legs that caught in her teeth.
Entomo Farms in Ontario, the province where I live, was described in 2015 by Canadian Business magazine as North America’s largest supplier of edible insects for human consumption. When visiting, I popped some of their roasted crickets into my mouth. They were crunchy, a little nutty. Nothing to get squeamish over. Perhaps the human consumption is indeed growing—my wife, at least, has joined me in my entomophagy adventures. When we celebrated our wedding anniversary at the Public Bar and Restaurant in Brisbane, Australia, the “Kang Kong Worms” and “Salmon, Manuka Honey, and Black Ants” seemed almost normal. Of course, the champagne helped.