By: Winston Wei

During Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour from March 17th, 2023 to November 26th, 2023, she had an embarrassing moment when she inhaled an insect and went into a period of coughing. After that scene, she quickly recovered and declared the insect to be “delicious.”

Swift, a famous pop star and singer-songwriter, told the crowd,

“It’s fine, it’s all… I’ve swallowed it. So I’m just gonna try not to do as many of those. This is gonna happen again tonight. There’s so many bugs. There’s thousands of them,” Swift said.

Like anyone else in the world, Swift inhaled an insect and had an embarrassing moment on stage.

When Swift swallowed the bug, she did not overreact. Instead, she used the scene in a positive way and even made a joke about it. This was a demonstration of how to deal with embarrassing moments.

Jerome Grant is a professor at the University of Tennessee.

“Bugs are everywhere. They’re part of our lives. They’re not going anywhere, and we’re not going anywhere, so we have to learn to live with them, even if it means swallowing them sometimes,” Grant said.

Most insects are harmless when we swallow or ingest them. However, in large quantities, they can be an issue. Some people have allergies to insects like cockroaches or moths, but in small quantities, they are fine.

“[It is] just a little extra protein,” Grant said.

There are estimates online claiming that people eat one to two pounds of bugs each year, which is an exaggeration since a bug usually weighs from 2.5 milligrams to 3 milligrams, which means that a person has to eat at least 800 insects each day.

Likewise, the US Department of Agriculture wrote, “It’s predicted that you’ll eat as much as 1 pound of insects in your lifetime — by accident, of course.”

The singer-songwriter is going to Mexico, Argentina, and Brazil to finish the Eras tour, where she hopefully will not swallow any more insects.