David George Gordon

David George Gordon, nicknamed The Bug Chef, was an American naturalist and non-fiction writer who spent decades arguing that insects belong on the dinner plate. Born in Chicago on 15 April 1950 to Bernard Gordon, a cosmetics factory worker, and Rosalie Sabath, a high school English teacher and social worker, he grew up a nature buff in a city of concrete. He was the brother of film director Stuart Gordon. After leaving the University of Wisconsin-Madison without a degree, he studied biology at Northeastern Illinois University, graduating in 1980, and worked as an aquarist at the Shedd Aquarium and later at Tacoma's Point Defiance Zoo and Aquarium.

Gordon built a first career as a science writer and technical writer for Washington Sea Grant, publishing guides on sharks, slugs, geoducks, seals and sea lions, and other Pacific Northwest life. In 1998 he published The Eat-a-Bug Cookbook, a whimsical yet serious primer on entomophagy that introduced Western readers to recipes such as Orthopteran Orzo, Cockroach a la King, Three Bee Salad and deep-fried tarantula. A revised edition appeared in 2013 from Ten Speed Press. He also wrote The Compleat Cockroach, Heaven on the Half Shell, and The Sasquatch Seeker's Field Manual, and spoke on Humanities Washington circuits about both edible insects and Bigfoot lore.

As The Bug Chef he became a showman as much as a naturalist. He cooked live on Nightline, Late Night with Conan O'Brien, The Late Late Show with James Corden and The View, and demonstrated insect cuisine at the Smithsonian Institution, Ripley's Believe It or Not! museums, and the Singapore Food Festival. The New York Times once described him as a young Einstein with a bushy beard, tousled hair and round spectacles. He told audiences that more than 80 percent of the world's cultures already eat insects, and that raising them could cut land, water and greenhouse-gas costs compared with livestock. He lived for years in Port Townsend and later Shoreline and the Seattle area with his third wife, painter Karen Luke Fildes, whom he married in 2009 after earlier marriages to Maureen Cleary and Mari Mullen ended in divorce.

Gordon died in Tacoma, Washington, on 4 August 2026, aged 76. The New York Times published a full obituary on 21 September 2026, remembering him as an apostle for bugs on the dinner plate whose book and television demos helped normalize entomophagy for a skeptical Western public.