In Algeria, Locusts are cooked in salt water, dried in the sun, and often used as an ingredient in cooking. Dried locusts are traded heavily in the markets.

Normally, the desert locusts live in relatively solitary lives in the arid central Sahara, Arabia, and Persian Gulf regions. When conditions are right, they form swarms that migrate for thousands of kilometers. These migrating swarms have invaded areas where people live, farm, and graze livestock. Locusts can consume roughly their own weight of vegetation each day. Swarms of millions will strip crops bare in hours. Their impact on human lives has often been so crippling that records of plagues have taken on religious significance and made their way into many historical texts.