If you weigh as much as 500,000 fireflies, your doctor may want you on a diet. Try cheddar-flavored worm larvae; it's only nine calories a serving and loaded with protein. Barley and bee salad is good, too; just keep away from the chocolate-covered grasshoppers for dessert. Cooking with bugs is just one of the weird things you can experience at the Insectarium in Philadelphia, the country's only interactive, all-bug museum. You'll see 100,000 insects, 10% of them alive and kicking. The petting corner, where you get to hold Vinnie the tarantula and pet a hissing beetle, may be more personal than you'd care to get but, compared to the cockroach kitchen and bath, it may suddenly seem the lesser of two evils. The kitchen and bath display is the museum's pièce de resistance, sitting squarely in the middle of the room surrounded by electrified plexiglass walls and the squeals of the squeamish. Roaches by the hundreds lounge here and there, but flip open the cupboards or sprinkle some water and thousands and thousands more swarm from their dark hiding places. There's never been an escape, or even an escape attempt - why bother when you're living in the buggy version of heaven? Still, the cockroaches eventually die, but don't worry - replacements are bred in cans of garbage behind the scenes.

The Insectarium is the brainchild of Steve Kanya, head bugmeister and former cop, who turned to stamping out bugs instead of crime. Always fascinated with insects, he started displaying his 'catch of the day' in the window of his exterminating business. The display attracted so much attention that he moved to a three-story building so he could have his pest execution business on the ground floor and put the museum on the upper two floors. Today half-a-dozen school groups visit every day, and it takes a staff of ten just to manage the bugs and visitors. It's a favorite place for kids' birthday parties: they're booked months in advance. Some years they hold a Bug Olympics. Ants have a weight-lifting competition. Other species, such as roaches, beetles and walking sticks (some grow to a foot in length) get their own racing event; an all-species race is the finale. At Halloween they have a bug costume contest and Spider Walk scavenger hunt. Downstairs in the gift shop, you can buy lunch boxes, ties, aprons, and picnic cloths festooned with various critters, while their website showcases 500 buggy items for sale.

Insectarium, 8046 Frankford Ave, Philadelphia, PA; [215 338 3000]; web: www.insectarium.com. Open Mon-Sat 10.00am-4.00pm.