A Closer Look at Crestline
By Lee Reeder

The Solution: Don’t Meet the Beetles—Eat the Beetles

I have an idea. It came to me last week after I dreamed I ate a tasty bark beetle. This wouldn’t be anything unusual for me—I’ve eaten many beetles in my lifetime, and not just as a kid.

Back in the U.S. Army during our survival training I ate bugs for more than a week to survive. These were big, dirty Kentucky forest bugs, and not just beetles. They were the kind of things you saw Timon and Pumba eating in “The Lion King,” except bigger and juicier and dirtier. Don’t let any sly meerkat or warthog or old military guy tell you stories about eating bugs—90 percent of them do not “taste like chicken” or even taste good at all. Truth be told, most of them had the flavor of whatever toxic plant they had been eating at the time you nabbed them. But most beetles are pretty good, and the smaller the better because the small ones are crunchy rather than squirty, if you can imagine my drift. But with beetles, I would caution you to just squish them with a stick first to make sure they’re not stink bugs before eating them. And never eat a ladybird beetle—even their distinctive coloring is a reminder to birds that they tasted nasty the first time they had made this mistake.

After the Army I also ate bugs every once in a while for a few months to qualify as a suitable boyfriend for a spoiled rich girl who had “picnics” on the beach with me where we ate gourmet bugs. She had this belief that there was some kind of moral middle ground between being a vegetarian and a T-Rex by eating things like fried baby bees instead of pork with your salad to get your meat group in the mix. In both military and hormonal cases, my self-serving goal was achieved by eating insects, and after eating a variety of winged things, ants, worms and all the rest, I concluded that the beetles were among the best.

So what are we waiting for? If everyone up here in the mountains would switch from beef, chicken and pork to bark beetles for their protein group, we could eat our way out of this problem. And it wouldn’t be a permanent diet change—we’d just do it until the Feds put the beetles on the endangered species list and made us stop.

I’ll open a restaurant. Perhaps I can get a grant from the Forest Service to help me. I’ll have the regular cooks, dishwashers and waiters, but I’ll also have a whole army of tree-climbing bug catchers. They would be trained to spot trees that have just been infested but not mortally wounded.  Instead of having these tree service guys rope to the top of the trees and cut them down for a few thousand dollars, I’d get my restaurant guys up there with some kind of ultrasonic device or something to get the beetles to come out of their holes, then we’d bring them back to the restaurant. The restaurant and everything in it would be entirely made of pine for ambience and payback, and of course, the only music played there would be the Fab Four.

I don’t think anyone would charge me anything for getting all of the bugs out of their trees before they are able to do damage, that is unless they catch the fever and are just raising them for their own tables. If people started charging me, I’d probably have to quit.

Crestliners would be trading recipes and critiquing which of the various beetles tastes the best. I bet the ones from the sugar pines would be the favorites. We could have an annual bark beetle festival like the garlic festival in Gilroy or the avocado festival in Fallbrook. We could have booths selling our favorite bark beetle dishes—chili, soup, appetizers, jelly, whatever. There would be a classic Volkswagen car show, bug races for the kids and some big guy dressed in a beetle suit whose fame would one day rival Barney or the San Diego Chicken, all that.

OK. Maybe not.

But here’s the alternative: If eating them is not feasible, then I guess we all have to hope that we get 10 inches of rain followed by 15 feet of snow this winter with 20-foot drifts, and then the temperature has to stay below zero for a month so the snow stays. Of course, if that happens and we all get snowed in for that long, we’ll wish the bark beetles had survived, because we’ll probably all end up having to eat bugs anyway.