chocolate covered bugs

August 2, 2016 12:18 PM

When were chocolate-covered bugs invented? What and where were the first chocolate covered bugs?

I know people have been eating bugs since the beginning of time. And someone once told me of eating souvenir chocolate covered ants and grasshoppers some time in the 60s or 70s. But when did it all start? And where? And by who?

posted by aniola to Food & Drink (3 answers total)

Grub [The New Yorker]:

Insects were among the original specialty foods in the American gourmet marketplace—inspired, impractical provocations that, like runway styles in retail clothing, drove the sales of more basic goods. In the early nineteen-forties, Max Ries, a German-Jewish textile manufacturer, came to Chicago and established himself as a purveyor of imported cheese to an American public that was beginning to be fascinated by exotic food. Ries was slim and dashing; he wore handmade suits and twirled his cigars. Alongside tinned tiger and elephant meat—culled from zoos and sold at department stores—he presented “French-fried ants” from Venezuela and baby bees from Japan, conversation pieces that lent glamour to his company, Reese Finer Foods, which actually made its money selling canned water chestnuts, artichoke hearts, and baby corn. Like fashionistas, gourmets have a sense of theatre. Excluded from the first Fancy Food Show, at the Sheraton-Astor, in New York, in 1955, Ries hired a limousine to shuttle buyers to a nearby hotel, where he had set up his own show, exhibiting only Reese products. (After that, the New Yorkers relented and gave him a booth, which became a mainstay.) When Reese had overstock of its Spooky Foods gift set—chocolate-covered ants, roasted butterflies, barbecue bees—it hired Bela Lugosi to appear in his Dracula costume with the product, which promptly sold out.

The timeline on the Reese Specialty Foods website suggests that the chocolate covered ants started in 1947.
posted by Kabanos at 12:42 PM on August 2, 2016 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: That's promising!

It looks like that's when they began importing chocolate covered South American ants. I wonder when the place they were being imported from began covering ants in chocolate.
posted by aniola at 12:55 PM on August 2, 2016

Anecdotally, my PopPop was famous for savoring the chocolate-dipped bees and ants as an exhibition piece at mid-century parties in West Los Angeles. As he'd tell it, folks would bring these tins to every get together, but nobody else had the nerve to pop the top and take a bite. He liked them!
posted by Scram at 11:29 PM on August 2, 2016