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They are small, brown and hairy, but the millions of bogong moths that have descended on Sydney are being hailed by some Australians as tasty treats rather than annoying pests.
The moths have invaded the 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 are even 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. They pass close to Sydney annually, but this year strong westerly winds have driven millions of them right in.
Although 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, a 51-year-old French chef and bush-tucker enthusiast who runs a restaurant in the trendy inner-city, also regards the 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.
Aborigines prized the moths as a food source, collecting them for millennia from caves and crevices in the mountains.
"They would singe off their wings and pound them into a dough. They'd eat with them bread, a bit like hummus," said Robinson. They were also baked into cakes. One study estimated that 100g of bogong moth abdomen has three times the fat, and almost twice the kilojoules, of a similar portion of Big Mac.
The moths are contaminated with high levels of pesticide from the crops they live on when they are larvae. "It's recommended that you don't eat more than 10 a day," he said.
With most Australians' reaction to the offer of eating a moth being along the lines of "Yuck, gross," over-consumption is unlikely.
