Dear Fiona,
When I was a kitten, I loved chasing butterflies. It’s fun to run after them as they flit and flutter.
But I didn’t eat them.
I asked my friend Rich Zack if that was an oversight. He’s an insect scientist at Washington State University.
He told me that insects are animals with muscles just like other animals that people eat—like cows and chickens.
“Insect muscle tissue is almost exactly the same as mammalian muscle tissue,” Zack said. “So, if there were a way to get that muscle tissue and process it, you could eat an insect steak or an insect hamburger.”
If you’ve ever eaten chicken breast, you’ve eaten a chicken’s flight muscles. Butterflies and other flying insects have flight muscles, too. The middle, chest-like section of an insect’s body is its thorax. All an insect’s legs and wings are attached to its thorax.
When most insects fly, they use their strong flight muscles to change the shape of their thorax. When the muscles squish and release the thorax, that makes the insect’s wings flap and move so the insect can fly.
The problem with chowing down on butterflies is that their flight muscles are tiny. There’s just not much to eat.
“When a bird eats a butterfly or a moth, it rips the wings off and throws them away—and then it eats the insect’s body,” Zack said. “But the body itself is relatively small, so the bird is picking at a lot of those. If you’re a human and you’re trying to do that—gosh, how many butterflies would you have to collect to fill a cup?”
You’d find more “meat” in a large dragonfly with a big, muscly thorax. Or you could find muscles similar to chicken thighs in the powerful jumping legs of a large grasshopper. But it would still be challenging to separate that muscle tissue from the rest of the insect and process it.
Zack told me that lots of people eat some insect relatives. All insects and all crustaceans belong to a group called arthropods.
“So, when you are pulling that meat out of a crab or when you are eating shrimp, you’re eating something very close to the musculature you would eat if we had a grasshopper as big as a Dungeness crab,” he said.
He also told me that insects are a nutritious food source for people. They’re full of protein and healthy fats. They contain vitamins and minerals. In fact, scientists say more than 2,000 kinds of insects are good for humans to eat. That includes lots of insects from the group that contains butterflies and moths—and the wriggly, muscly caterpillars that are their young.
But some butterflies protect themselves from predators by eating toxic plants. That makes them toxic, too.
That’s why it’s always a good idea to check with an adult before you add something you collected from nature to your peanut butterfly and jelly sandwich.
Sincerely,
Dr. Universe