Dragonfly

Appears in
Oxford Companion to Food

By Alan Davidson

Published 2014

  • About

dragonfly a kind of insect which is eaten in many Asian countries. Pemberton (1995) collected data about their capture and ways of eating them from a number of countries and by personal investigation in Bali (Indonesia). He noted that the Balinese often use the sticky latex of the jackfruit tree as a means of capture. He recalls the report by Covarrubias (1937)

that children caught dragonflies by holding latex tipped poles higher than the places where dragonflies were perched. This induced the ‘rank conscious’ dragonflies to fly up and land on the tip of the poles, where they became stuck.