Plague of moths has upside for those with taste for the exotic
Sydney
They are small, brown and hairy, but the millions of bogong moths that are plaguing Sydney are being hailed by some Australians as tasty treats rather than annoying pests.
The moths have descended on the harbour city on a scale not seen for years. They are everywhere - in offices and homes, plastered to the facades of buildings, fluttering around street lights and squashed into carpets. They even become trapped in trains and buses, where schoolchildren delight in swatting them dead.
The moths are on their annual migration from the wide open plains west of the Great Dividing Range to the Australian Alps, on the border with New South Wales and Victoria. After a journey of hundreds of kilometres, they hibernate in caves, huddling together in thick, twitching carpets. They always pass close to Sydney but this year strong westerly winds have driven millions of them into the city itself.
While most Sydneysiders see them as an irritation or as downright disgusting, a hardy few are urging people to tuck in.
'I usually eat them raw,' Australian Museum naturalist Martyn Robinson, one of the chief proponents of moth-munching, said yesterday. 'But if we have people coming round for dinner or I feel like doing something special, I put them in a stir fry or an omelette. They're very nice with chilli oil.'
Jean-Paul Bruneteau is a French-born chef who came to Australia 40 years ago. He has pioneered the concept of bush tucker, cooking with native ingredients such as lemon myrtle and Illawarra plum, and creating dishes like wattle seed pavlova. He too regards bogong moths as a delicacy.
He says roasting them gives them a nutty, popcorn flavour resembling buttered hazelnut. He recommends wrapping them in crepes or pancakes after frying them in canola oil.
Never one to shirk a culinary challenge, City Views put the moths to the taste test yesterday. I collected a handful of bogongs from the back garden, squashed them dead between my fingers and stripped them of their wings. I ate the first one raw - its tiny body was filled with a yellow goo which tasted a bit like mild, creamy peanut butter.
Frying them in melted butter made them even more palatable - not unlike a porcini mushroom. They were really rather tasty. The only downsides are the fine dust that comes off the moths' bodies and makes a mess of the kitchen, and getting their tiny legs stuck in the back of the throat.
The moths were prized as a food source by Aborigines, who for millennia collected them from caves and crevices in the mountains.
'They would singe off their wings and pound them into a dough,' Mr Robinson said.
'They'd eat them with bread, a bit like hummus. They'd also bake them into cakes which would last a long time on journeys because of the high fat content.'
One study estimates that 100 grams of bogong moth abdomen has three times the fat, and almost twice the kilojoules, of a similar portion of Big Mac.
However, the moths are also contaminated with high levels of pesticide from the crops they live on as caterpillars.
'It's recommended that you don't eat more than 10 a day,' Mr Robinson said. 'There's now such a residue of pesticides that the moths carry a bit of arsenic in their bodies.'
With most Australians' reaction being, 'Yuck, gross', over-consumption is unlikely to be much of a problem.
