From a Southern Voice article titled Eatin’ of the Green by George Oliver:
If you think crabs and lobsters are delicious, and you’re not turned off by the way they look, then you have no right to gasp at a sautéed cicada on your plate.
Do you think that the first person in beachside cooking history looked at a crab scurrying across a sand bar and said “yum”? No, he probably said, “ohmagod, what a hideous beast, with way too many legs and dirty, unfashionable armor.”
If he was gay, he might have also mused on its possible use as a campy cave latrine decoration. If he then decided it might be good to eat, he was either very adventurous or very hungry.
Now in the interest of full disclosure, I haven’t actually eaten a cicada yet, so I had to go online to see what cooking techniques are recommended. I suspected that, like with crabs and lobsters, a mature creature might be too hard, but how do you crack a cicada, and is there much to eat inside?