Story pick: Creepy, crawly, crunchy, chewy. It's bugs for dinner.

The beetles I ate in a Vietnam market were not, frankly, the grossest meal I've ever had (that would be the one I had in a hotel banquet hall at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago). But I don't need to eat any more bugs.

Still, I loved reading about people who do. Eat bugs, I mean. For a Friday treat, please try Sumathi Reddy's delicious look at "entomophagy," the eating of insects by people other than motorcycle riders. It was a front pager in Thursday's Wall Street Journal.

For years, the idea has been pushed by champions such as David Gracer in Rhode Island, who has a company that sells processed edible insects, and David George Gordon, a Seattle-based science writer who published the Eat-a-Bug Cookbook in 1998. Buggy fare has been featured at the Audubon Insectarium in New Orleans and at events like BugFest at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences and Bug Bowl at Purdue University in Indiana.

A recent paper put out by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations cited nibbles of interest in industrialized countries: Special insect dinners in Japan often sell out, and in the Netherlands, insects marketed as "bugsnuggets" and "buglibars" can be found at supermarkets. In the U.K., a website called Edible.com sells toffee scorpion candy, giant toasted leafcutter ants and oven-baked tarantulas.