Edible Chicago
A recipe, article, and photos for Edible Chicago on the 2024 cicada emergence—the largest in more than 200 years—and how and why we should eat them.
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For Edible Chicago, our goal was to reframe cicadas as more than just a seasonal spectacle—but as an invitation to reconsider what we eat and why. Through reporting, photography, and hands-on experimentation, we explored the cultural histories, nutritional benefits, and environmental implications of entomophagy, while acknowledging the deep-rooted hesitations many have toward eating insects.
Laura’s photography captured cicadas in both their natural state and as an ingredient, while Colin’s writing traced the tensions between disgust and curiosity, tradition and taboo. Together, we created a piece that challenges assumptions, offering readers not just a reason, but a recipe, to embrace a protein source that has existed far longer than our diets—and will continue to buzz long after.
In Western society, we have not pivoted toward eating insects, even as we praise their ubiquity elsewhere or their environmental impact. Like cicadas, humans are creatures of habit — we’re rigid in our ways, rarely emerging and diverting from what we know.
Will you start eating three square meals of cicadas? Will you start to think of your neighborhood trees as urban cicada farms? Is this the summer you become a cicada-fed baddie?
Probably not. But in these times of urgency and pessimism, there always exists a shimmer of hope: You can try.
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