Maybe it's a delicacy. Maybe it's something that we enjoy doing.

Maybe we just want to have a butter-fried, chocolate-covered cicada because it's delicious.

If your lawn is currently flooded with cicadas, you might be looking for a way to get rid of the noisy little invaders.

But have you thought about just-eating them?

Some cultures consider insects a delicacy, and billions of humans eat them on a regular basis.

Others relegate bug consumption to schoolyard dares and those weird little novelty lollipops, remember those?

But increasingly, skeptical folks are coming around to the idea that insects might just taste good.

And I've brought in my favorite insect-eating ambassador and chef Joseph Yoon to tell us all about nymph kimchi, deep-fried cicadas and other delicious dishes you can prepare with ingredients plucked fresh from your backyard.

For Scientific American's Science Quickly, I'm Rachel Feltman. My name is Joseph Yoon.

I'm the chef and founder of Brooklyn Bugs and also an edible insect ambassador.

And we have had a lifelong love of insects, but we've never really considered eating or cooking them in a serious manner until 2017, when an artist approached us to work on an art project to help conquer her fear of insects by eating them.

And I said yes immediately because I love to think about ways to integrate art into my life and into my work.

When I began researching edible insects, I came upon the UN's FAO, the Food and Agriculture Organization, report in 2013 Edible Insects: Future Prospects for Food and Feed Security.

And this report was and continues to be my guiding North Star.

And it really profoundly had an impact on me to think that we can take something so visceral and so, so weird for a lot of our American counterparts and then to think that it can address food security and sustainability, health and nutrition, workforce activations, and livelihoods and environmentalism-this became a tremendous source of motivation and inspiration for me.

I've heard you say before that as a chef, your top reason for eating insects will always be taste.

So let's start there instead of with all the environmental and health arguments for eating bugs.

What are your favorites, and what do they taste like?

Yeah, what I love is that when we begin to talk about flavor profiles with edible insects, I like to first have people imagine-describe for me the flavor of chicken without using the word chicken.

We begin to realize the difficulty and challenges of describing flavors of things that we're even very familiar with.

So with that being said, there are over 2,000 known species of edible insects-all with such wildly different flavor profiles, textures and functionality-and the manner in which we prepare them, what they're fed and reared on, and the substrate, the terroir, they will all have an impact on the ultimate flavor of the insects.

So we're going to generalize a little bit and describe some flavor profiles for you.

But I did want to just kind of preface it with some general notes.

It's true. I could not tell you what chicken tastes like. That question's going to haunt me.

So if we were to-just to start with some of the basic insects, I mean, a lot of the flavor profiles are characterized as, like, nutty or earthy or mushroomy.

And those are descriptive and accurate to a certain degree, but there are, like-how many hundreds of different nuts are there that taste so different?

But as a general characterization of flavor, crickets do have a nutty, earthy flavor to them.

Depending on how they're prepared, we can manipulate that flavor.

Just like if we were to cook something with garlic and aromatics like onions and ginger, it'll impact the ultimate flavor of the dish.

One of the really interesting flavor profiles that I particularly enjoy are with various species of ants that have formic acid as a defense mechanism.

So it gives it this really beautiful acidic sort of flavor, which is really surprising.