Actor Nicolas Cage famously chomped on a live cockroach in the 1988 cult comedy Vampire’s Kiss and is now proposing the idea of eating bugs to save starving people on the planet.
Although he told Yahoo Entertainment that cockroach consumption was more of a set-up piece of method acting he now regrets, he is not so quick to rule out the consumption of other bugs if it will help feed – and heal – the planet.
If only we could just get over our fear of creepy crawlies on the menu, he said, while running through what he saw as the nutritional value of the diet:
If you could get rid of your fear, your phobia of eating insects, you could solve world starvation
High protein, no fat, excellent nutrients, abundance. They’re everywhere!
Cage quickly qualified his own proposal by saying it might not be as popular as he thinks, lamenting … “But nope — not gonna happen.”
Watch as Nicolas Cage eats a live cockroach in Vampire’s Kiss:
Cage’s insect revelations came during an interview about his role as Count Dracula in the new horror comedy Renfield, co-starring Nicholas Hoult as the famous vampire’s long-suffering servant, R.M. Renfield, who eats insects when in need of a power boost.
“The cockroaches I got to eat in this were caramel,” Hoult confessed in the interview. “I also had crickets that were actually quite yummy; they were salt and vinegar flavored or barbecue smoky flavored.”
But Cage insists his right-hand man is just being modest. “[Nicholas] ate a potato bug, so he took it to another level,” the actor said beaming with pride.
“[Potato bugs] are terrifying to me, and so are cockroaches.” So how do potato bugs taste? “It wasn’t good,” Hoult confessed. “It didn’t dry out so good, and tasted every bit of bug.”