Cicadas can't eat you, but you can eat them.

AP Photo

Let's cut to the chase: How do cicadas taste?

Papery. A tad bitter.

Which I know, not from dry research, but direct personal experience. This is not my first rodeo, cicada-wise. Seventeen years ago, I was knocking cicadas off my spirea — the bugs covered my yard, "like the invading insect army in a horror movie." Inspired by colleague, I raised a glove bearing one of the five-eyed beasties to my lips and popped it into my mouth.

Not at all unpleasant.

I also fried them up, for my boys, then 10 and 11.

This is the week trillions of cicadas are expected to emerge in Illinois — Ground Zero, cicada-wise, due to the overlap of the 13-year and 17-year cicada broods, an alignment not seen since the Jefferson administration.

"We're going to start to be able to see them," said David Horvath, a certified arborist with The Davey Tree Expert Company. "Right now, squirrels and raccoons and possums are running around, having a field day chowing down on cicadas."

Which is also why there are so many — they're flooding the zone.

"Their whole survival strategy is predator satiation," Horvath said. "They're going to overwhelm the predators; it's impossible for squirrels to consume them all."

I was concerned after reading Kade Heather’s piece in the Sun-Times quoting the Morton Arboretum warning about the advisability of protecting young trees with netting. I have a lot of young trees — planted 15 at the end of 2022. Like anyone facing something they don't want to do, a sought a second opinion, from Northbrook forester Terry Cichocki.

"The tree species cicadas favor are oaks, maples and fruit trees," she said. "However, if you don’t do anything with the smaller trees, they will most likely have some damage, but not life-threatening. The cicadas prefer the mature trees. The damage would show up as broken branch tips, which could recover."

Horvath finds netting something of a 2024 fad.

Photo provided by The Davey Tree Expert Co.

"If someone nets a tree, people notice it, and think, 'I'm behind the eight ball. I've got to net my tree,'" he said, not overly concerned about damage.

"I'm excited about cicadas rather than worried," said Horvath, based at Davey's Lake Bluff office. "Because they're something to be appreciated. Quite the phenomena: Every 17 years, these massive numbers of this insect emerge, and in my opinion they offer way more benefit than harm."

Leading to our next question: Why every 17 years? Nobody really knows. Could be related to glaciers, could be involved with thwarting predators, which can't rely on a meal that shows up not quite six times a century.

I ended up putting bird netting around an oak I have hopes for, brought back from Ontonagon, Michigan, not a yard high. Fruit trees are thought to be particularly susceptible, but 17 years ago I had just planted an apple tree and it weathered the cicadas fine. I would encourage you not to net any tree that you have to step onto a ladder to wrap — branches aren't the only thing that can be broken, and the last thing you want to do is snap your neck falling off a ladder while trying to protect a sapling.

Cicadas not only feed wildlife, but also plants.

"As they emerge, they're aerating the soil. That's a huge benefit," Horvath said. "After they're done mating, they die, then you have millions of these dead bodies going to decompose and return nutrition to feed the plants."

And not just feed plants. I asked Horvath if he would eat one.

"Absolutely," he said. "I'm the guy in the office that eats anything and everything. I'm always game for eating things. I find it fun; I don't find it gross. It's food."

Eating cicadas doesn't seem the media stunt this year that it was in 2007. Sun-Times columnist Esther J. Cepeda ate one with a shrug. "People in Mexico eat insects all the time; they'll chow grasshoppers, scorpions," she noted in her column about the experience. "They're high in protein, just ask Rick Bayless about it. So cicadas? Not kosher, but still no biggie."

And how were they?

"Papery and bland, it was not gooey-sour and far less crunchy than I'd imaged," she wrote. "Hardly worth the sensation of feeling it slide — quasi-flapping — down my esophagus followed by a chaser of Diet Coke. Next time I think I'll try the garlic and butter."

Next time is now, and I couldn't resist putting in a call to Cepeda, luxuriating down in Florida. Are you busy chopping garlic and clarifying butter?

"I'm not planning to," she said with a laugh.