David George Gordon, a science writer who elevated the culinary profile of insects with “The Eat-a-Bug Cookbook,” a guide to deep-frying tarantulas and sautéing crickets, and with boisterous, squirm-inducing cooking demonstrations on late-night television, died Aug. 4 in Tacoma, Wash. He was 76.
His death, in a hospital, was caused by complications of a fall, his daughter Julia Mullen Gordon said.
Known as the bug chef, Mr. Gordon looked like a young Einstein, with a bushy beard, tousled hair, and round spectacles. To many, he was a figure of considerable oddity.
On “Late Night With Conan O’Brien,” the wisecracking host called Mr. Gordon a “freak” and, for good measure, “a very strange man.” The Seattle Post-Intelligencer declared that “a more bent mind would be hard to find on the Olympic Peninsula.”
In Mr. Gordon’s view, people like O’Brien were the freaks for not embracing insects the way he did: as a sustainable (and delicious) source of protein eaten by billions of people around the world, especially in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.
“We’re really the weirdos because we don’t eat bugs,” Mr. Gordon told Business Insider in 2013. “Western ideas about taste are pretty narrowly defined.”
Mr. Gordon began chewing on the idea of eating insects while writing his 1996 book “The Compleat Cockroach,” about their biology, history, and behavior. (There is no typo in the title.)
Intended as a paean to a “wizened old soul,” as the introduction describes the six-legged critter, Mr. Gordon cast a wide net in his research. In “Some New and Interesting Points in Ships’ Hygiene” (1911), by the British medical official W. Melville-Davison, he read a passage that made his antennae twitch.
“Shelled cockroaches,” Melville-Davison wrote, “are in flavor similar to shrimps.” With proper salting, they taste delicious “in certain popular sauces.”
Mr. Gordon thought, “Wow, this is really weird,” he later told The Kansas City Star.
In “The Compleat Cockroach,” he included a section on cuisine, describing ways that cockroaches have been prepared for centuries. Roach jam, he wrote, is a “supposedly succulent dish made from a choice selection of blattarians that were to be simmered in vinegar all morning, then dried in the sun.”
Mr. Gordon then began researching other insect delicacies. He was astonished to learn that insects were an ordinary food in many cultures -- a discovery that made him feel that westerners, especially Americans, had been missing out.
“Once I got more information, rather than write a scholarly text, I thought a cookbook would be a really cool way of getting my message across,” Mr. Gordon told The Virginia Quarterly Review in 2016.
He tested recipes he had come across in entomology and anthropology research journals as well as ones from bug experts including Zack Lemann, an entomologist and insect keeper.
Mr. Gordon sourced his insects from suppliers whose typical customers were pet stores and research laboratories. The bugs arrived alive and went into the freezer for their final slumber.
“That’s probably the most humane way to dispatch the bugs because they’re basically drifting off into a deep sleep, kind of like a Jack London story,” he told Vice. “They just don’t wake up.”
“The Eat-a-Bug Cookbook,” which Mr. Gordon published in 1998, included recipes for curried termite stew, larval latkes, and fried green tomato hornworms. He understood it would be a tough sell.
“We have a mistrust or dislike of bugs,” Mr. Gordon told The Spokesman-Review of Spokane. “The idea of eating them is sort of like sleeping with the enemy.”
A few weeks after the book was published, O’Brien invited him on his show for a cooking demonstration. The host gave Mr. Gordon a taste of what he was up against.
“First of all, why?” O’Brien said, surveying a bowl of farm-raised cricket nymphs in orzo. “Why eat bugs? Why do that?”
“You know, it’s a vast overlooked resource,” Gordon said. “Bugs outnumber us thousands to one. So I say, why not eat bugs?”
That response did not satiate O’Brien.
“There’s plenty of dirt out there, too,” he replied, “but you don’t see me running around a field with a big spoon.”
Mr. Gordon helped him make “Sheesh! Kebabs” -- skewers of tomatoes, mushrooms and very robust grasshoppers. O’Brien took a bite, then immediately went to a commercial.
David George Gordon was born in Chicago on April 15, 1950. His father, Bernard Gordon, worked in a cosmetics factory. His mother, Rosalie (Sabath) Gordon, was a social worker and later taught English in high school.
His interest in the natural world was kindled by large aquariums that his father kept well stocked in the family room. He also play-acted with his older brother, Stuart, who later became a filmmaker specializing in horror. (Stuart Gordon died in 2020.)
David followed his brother to the University of Wisconsin Madison but dropped out and moved to California. He returned to Chicago to work in theater and eventually enrolled at Northeastern Illinois University, majoring in biology.
During college, he worked as an aquarist at the Shedd Aquarium in Chicago and lived in a series of bug-ridden apartments. “Cockroach infestations were practically written into every apartment rental agreement I signed,” he wrote in “The Compleat Cockroach.”
After graduating from Northeastern Illinois in 1980, he moved to the Seattle area to work at the Point Defiance Zoo and Aquarium before eventually transitioning to science writing.
“The Eat-a-Bug Cookbook” was not a bestseller, but Mr. Gordon did not despair.
“I think he was too optimistic and upbeat a person for that,” Lemann, the bug curator, said in an interview. “I think he was simply trying to introduce to an American audience a practice that’s common in other parts of the world so that we could expand our thinking.”
In that way, he was successful.
He cooked insects at food festivals and frequently on TV, including memorable appearances on “The View” and “The Late Late Show With James Corden.”
“The Eat-a-Bug Cookbook” was also mentioned in a United Nations report promoting insects as an important resource in addressing food insecurity.
“Chefs and food culture play a large role in determining the acceptance of foods,” the report said. “In some cases, those who would be averse to eating a whole grasshopper might enjoy a mealworm cupcake instead.”
Mr. Gordon was also gratified when high-end restaurants including Xochi in Houston, Guelaguetza in Los Angeles, and Oyamel, in New York and Washington, D.C., put bugs on their menus.
“I’m not trying to get the whole world to eat bugs,” he told The Star in 2001. “I’m actually just trying to get people to look at bugs in a different way.”
Mr. Gordon’s marriages to Maureen Cleary and Mari Mullen ended in divorce.
He married the painter Karen Luke Fildes in 2009. She illustrated several of his books, including “The Secret World of Slugs and Snails: Life in the Very Slow Lane” (2010) and a revised 2013 edition of “The Eat-a-Bug Cookbook.”
Besides his wife, he also leaves two children from his first marriage, Jennifer Cleary and Vic Motherwell; a daughter from his second marriage, Julia Mullen Gordon; three stepchildren, Marian Call, Ellen Kilcup, and David Pew; and four grandchildren.
Mr. Gordon wasn’t picky when it came to eating insects, but cockroaches never thrilled him.
“They have kind of a chemical taste to them,” he told The Virginia Quarterly Review.
That flavor comes naturally, though.
“It’s not from people spraying them with roach spray,” he said.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.