REARVIEW

EAT-A-BUG COOKBOOK COOKS UP TREATS
“Waiter, there’s a fly in my soup!” Or wait…maybe it’s a katydid, a silkworm or a tasty young bee. Anything’s possible at the Eat-A-Bug Cafe, also known as the kitchen of naturalist David George Gordon, entomological epicure extraordinaire.

Gordon has gone to the ends of the earth, to his backyard and under the refrigerator to find culinary inspiration, and now, after years of experimentation with entomolphagy (that’s bug eating, FYI), he presents the results in the “Eat-A-Bug Cookbook” (Ten Speed Press, 1998).

SURVEY SAYS…
Each week on www.pctonline.com, PCT surveys its readers about issues facing the pest control industry today. Here are some recent results about topics affecting you and your company. Be sure to stop by to www.pctonline.com weekly to participate in the weekly poll!

Q: Do you use baits, liquids or both in your termite treatments?

• Baits and liquids: 65 percent
• Liquids only: 30 percent
• Baits only: 5 percent

Q: What is the most important factor limiting the ability of your company to grow? (Choose only ONE)

• Lack of qualified labor: 36 percent
•  Insufficient capital: 21 percent
• Poor marketing: 13 percent
• Regulations: 11 percent
• Management problems: 9 percent
• Competition: 7 percent
• Weather: 3 percent

NO GOLD FOR COCKROACH-EATING COOPER
We don’t know if Australian Freestyle Skier Jacqui Cooper ate the recipe at left but we do know she did eat some roaches while training for the Olympics.
Cooper fell at the 1998 Nagano Games but was among the favorites for her event until she tore her ACL practicing at the Salt Lake City games in February. After the Nagano games four years ago, Cooper visited a local herbalist who created a cockroach potion for her.

Here she describes the cockroach drink (from www.olympics.com): “I went to a local herbalist, and he made up the concoction, the recipe, and it consisted of copper, myrrh, frankincense and dried wingless cockroaches. That was put in a blender, and I would boil that every single day on the barbecue and make it into a bubbling broth. I mixed it in with Diet Coke just to get some fizzy, cold, like a different type of taste, hold my nose, shoot the formula. I would have to eat some candy straight away, because the taste was just revolting.

“It’s so bad, and a lot of people said, ‘Are you nuts? I don’t understand why you would do this.’ I said, ‘You know what? If you had the opportunity to be world No. 1 for three years in a row, you would do that, too.’ I would drink that every day now, even if it meant it would give me a 5 percent advantage going into Salt Lake. I’m so hungry for the win that I’d do it. I’m desperate. I’ll do anything it takes to win every single week.”