If you’ve been anywhere outside around Baltimore over the past few weeks, you’ve probably seen or heard the summer cicadas. This year is special for cicadas, as the Brood X of periodical cicadas have emerged en mass in some regions of the eastern United States after 17 years of underground living. In this episode, we discuss why the cicadas are emerging now and what they are doing. Food policy expert Dr. Jess Fanzo (twitter: @jessfanzo) shares with us why some people even try cooking up and eating these insects and why our food choices matter (and even how you might cook up some cicadas yourself)!

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Useful links:

Dr. Fanzo on WMAR Baltimore: https://www.wmar2news.com/news/local-news/why-eating-cicadas-is-good-for-you-and-good-for-the-environment

A free cicada cookbook: http://www.tullabs.com/cicadaworld/cicadarecipes.pdf

Music: ‘Lucky Massive Dangerous’ by Speck

Editing: Yun-Fei Liu

Intro: Chris Seong Yeol An

Interviewers: Ashton Omdahl and Yun-Fei Liu

Outro: Chris Seong Yeol An

With help from: Michael Dryzer, Emily Han, Sebastian Markert, and Michael Xie