I’ve had cicada, and I would say it tastes nutty, with a hint of canned asparagus and a little bit of grassiness.
I tried witchety grubs in Australia, IIRC they had been lightly roasted.
I was reminded, in both taste and texture, of a soft-boiled egg. Not completely disgusting, definitely something you would eat if you were starving, and probably long before that if you weren’t grossed out by the idea.
~~Space Ghost
In the movie Good Morning Miss Dovea New England schoolteacher (Jennifer Jones) states emphatically that ants taste like pickles. No idea if this is true.
My own grade school teacher ate cooked locusts once as part of her church outting because the Bible states John the Baptist ate them. She said they taste a lot like shrimp (which would make sense as, IINM, they’re somewhat related). There’s a very good chance she ate bugs in vain as the NT was very probably talking about the carob(“fruit” of thelocust tree) rather than bugs, but this is a matter of some debate. I don’t recall whether or not she or others in her Sunday School classed dressed in camel hairwith leather girdlesor ate wild honey which the Baptist did also.
Claiming that John really ate the fruit of the locust tree rather than the actual insect is, in mu opinion (and think most scholarly opinion) straining at a gnat rather than swallowing the locust. Other folks in that area of the world ate grasshopper-type locusts. Aristotle was supposed to be a big fan, himself. When the locusts ate your crops, you often didn’t have much of a choice, but lots of folks would eat them as a matter of choice.
I had a bundegi (silkworm pupa) in Korea. I remember the texture more than the taste. It was really gritty. I think it was kind of bitter, but I may have blocked that part out. (It had been sautéed with some onions–not by me–but it didn’t help.)