Looking for the perfect gift for your cooking-enamored friend? Why, look no further.

The Eat-A-Bug Cookbook is a compelling and, surprisingly, readable guide to cooking insects. Subtitled “33 ways to cook grasshoppers, ants, water bugs, spiders, centipedes, and their kin” with a kooky-looking chef on its cover, it may look like it belongs in the jokes section. The book, however, is deathly serious.

In fact, author David George Gordon contends that eating bugs (which are made up of mostly proteins) is both a healthy food choice and gentle on the earth. A naturalist, Gordon takes advantage of people’s innate aversion to the subject by pulling the reader into a knowledgeable discussion of history, anthropology, science, pop culture and culinary arts.

The recipes are presented in a clear and easy to follow manner with educational tidbits about the history and life of the insects included in the dish. Recipes you are likely to never forget (even if you do decide not to try it) include the Three Bee Salad (bees, what else?), Really Hoppin’ John (grasshoppers) and Fried Green Hornworm. Full-color photos of the delicious-looking dishes adorn each recipe. Additionally, he makes note of insects you want to avoid in your cooking.

To help you out in your newfound culinary specialty, the author compiles a three-page list of suppliers selling edible bugs and insects (both live and ready to cook), tips to catching your own insects for personal consumption and organizations that sponsor events related to eating bugs.