They're baaaack! A plague of those creepy crawly Mormon crickets are chewing their way through Elko, Nevada, and they're headed our way. Twenty years ago, almost 2.5 million acres in Utah were infested with them, and Tooele County was one of the worst-hit areas.

Native Americans long valued these ugly bugs for their nutritional value, herding them to gather, roast and grind into a flour of sorts, making edible cakes that pioneers called "desert fruitcakes".

If you're not a native Utahn, you may not have heard the famous tale of the 1848 cricket invasion. The newly arrived Latter-day Saints had barely been in the Salt Lake Valley for a year and had worked hard and fast to plant and raise crops. The late harvest that first year was bleak, and spring the following year had late frosts that destroyed the second planting season.

Sometime during their second summer here, black swarms of these scary-looking bugs appeared. These creatures travel in huge bands and will eat all plant material in their path. They crawled and chewed their way to the gardens of the Saints, threatening to wipe out major food sources.

The story goes that the settlers prayed for a miracle and, sure enough, a huge flock of seagulls came and ate all the bugs, saving the crops. What is now known as the "Miracle of the Gulls" is mostly factual, and it's why the seagull (actually the California gull) is the state bird of Utah. These particular gulls are a desert bird and have been in Utah for centuries. They certainly didn't eat all the crickets, and crop damage also occurred due to drought conditions in the state during those years.

White folk aren't known to eat bugs. And I've never seen any historical records that Utah pioneers regularly ate these crickets—but frankly, they should have! Sun-dried and ground up, cricket flour is 60% protein, 10% carbohydrates and roughly 3,000 calories per kilogram.

Nowadays, you can buy "3 Cricketeers" dark chocolate candy bars, Cricket Crunch Bars, Chocolate Chip Cricket Cookie Mix with Cricket Flour, as well as dried edible "Crick-ettes" flavored with salt and vinegar, sour cream and onion or bacon and cheese. Entolife brand dried crickets from Maine are flavored with chocolate and coffee or sriracha.

Silly pioneers! We could have had our famous Utah funeral potatoes with dried bugs mixed in, or even added crickets to our official state snack, Jell-O. (As an aside, Jell-O became the official state snack in 2001, when Bill Cosby visited the Utah Senate and encouraged lawmakers' support).

They may be part of the food chain, but they are smelly and bug-ly!