Bugs! They’re What’s for Dinner

What would an insect need to taste like for you to add it to your diet? How about … bacon? That smoky flavor seems to be the secret behind a Montclair State anthropologist’s success in improving nutrition and saving lemurs in Madagascar through farming the crunchy Zanna tenebrosa, aka the “bacon bug.”

“We knew they were delicious – they taste just like bacon – but it turns out that they’re also nutritious,” says Assistant Anthropology Professor Cortni Borgerson. “The farms we’ve created are really taking off, and insect consumption has increased by more than 1,000%.”

And beyond that, the more insects are eaten in the wilds of Madagascar, the fewer endangered lemurs will be hunted, which has long been Borgerson’s goal.

Until last March, Borgerson split her time each year between the manicured campus of Montclair State and the wilds of the Masoala Peninsula on northeastern Madagascar, where, for the past 15 years, in one way or another, she has been working on both lemur conservation and improving malnutrition. In the last year, her grant-funded project to farm these “bacon bugs” is proving to solve both problems.

Her last trip to Madagascar was this past Spring Break, when, while she was there, the World Health Organization declared a global pandemic, and many areas of the world locked down. Getting back home was an adventure in itself – starting with having to wait out a cyclone before being able to leave the island in the Indian Ocean off the east coast of Africa.

“I managed to get on one of the last flights out of Madagascar before everything shut down,” says Borgerson, “but our work continues here, as well as [in Madagascar], thanks to our incredible research team there.”

To read the full article on Borgerson’s research, visit Montclair Magazine.