Bugs are Back on the Menu
by Lloyd Alter, Toronto 
on 01.15.08
Image Credit Dish a Day
Wayne Roberts writes in Alternatives about a major food group that most westerners (but only a 20% minority of people on the planet) are missing out on: insects.
With fusion dishes all the rage, and fooderati clamoring for adventurous ways to blend all the world’s food traditions in one appetizer, it’s only a matter of time before honeyed grasshopper with a watermelon reduction makes the culinary hit parade. French-born chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten, the toast of high-end fusionista, just tested an ant larvae salad for his global restaurant chain’s first Mexican eatery. Sometime soon, customers at old-fashioned greasy spoons will complain: “Waiter, there’s no bug in my soup.”
Roberts continues:
Environmentalists and conservationists should be big on bugs. Edible insects don’t appear on any endangered species lists, and their sustainable use could help conserve other wildlife since the tactic may contribute to habitat protection. Insects also have an excellent feed-to-meat ratio. Living low on the food chain, they consume much less feed per pound of human nutrient than farmed fish or livestock. Forests don’t have to be cleared, fields don’t need to be ploughed or irrigated, and crops don’t require toxic sprays to protect habitat capable of attracting large concentrations of insects so that they can then be efficiently harvested.
He concludes by asking:
As we enter an era of scarcity imposed by climate chaos and the exhaustion of renewable and non-renewable resources, could bugs offer one form of salvation? ::Alternatives Journal
Other articles by Wayne Robers that we have noted:
Water: Saving the Planet One Drop at a Time
Give Peas a Chance: How Gardening Can Effect Change :
Follow @TreeHugger on Twitter & get our headlines with @TH_rss!
i know it is just my 'western' american upbringing, but ewww! i don't care how healthy, how sustainable, or even what they taste like - ewww!
First of all, I'd like to say EW. That being said, why do we love crabs and lobsters and shrimp so much? They're basically cousins to the creepy crawlers. Logically, they should be equally appetizing to us...
I agree-- If you like crab, lobsters, and shrimp, then you should have no issues with insects, they are basically the same. Look at those micro shrimp on pizzas, those look just like maggots.
Also, farmed insects can be fed in a controlled manner, sometimes flavorful herbs, whereas "sea-bugs" eat garbage off of the sea floor.
We just have gross perceptions of bugs because we have seen so many of them splattered on our windshields and underfoot.
I can not help associating bugs with filth. Flies crawl all over feces, maggots represent the epitome of vermin infestation. Insects are vectors for many types of disease.
Eat them? No thanks.
I guess if they were raised in a closed environment and certified clean and disease-free, I might be OK with using them as pet food.
Lobster is basically a seagoing cockroach. I'd rather eat organic protein from a bug than GMO or cloned animals.
Takuma:
The problem with insects is that they are generally too small to be cut apart and divided into "good" and "bad" parts... you have to eat them whole (mostly).
Which leads me to my main concern... do people who eat bugs make them fast before eating them, to make sure the bug guts are empty?
I think it's nurture... (nature vs. nurture). We've all (here) been trained to think of bugs as bad and pests. In other cultures, very young kids are seeing their older relatives eating them so it just becomes another food product.
I can't eat lobster, shrimp, or crab due to a lot of things, appearance being one of them.
Most of us also don't have nightmarish run-ins with lobsters or crabs... like we open up a seldom used room and BAM there's a blueclaw crab flying at us!! Or under the porch light! Zap Zap !!
What does PETA think? Free range Madagascar Hissing Cockaroaches?
Now as I sit here and eat my chicken soup ... I wonder what that bird was pecking around in prior to its demise. Hmmm.
The world is a dirty place.
Clean your plate!!
vsk
Ewww? Common', dairy milk is eeeew!
The only way you are ever going to get westerners to eat large quantities of bugs is if you detonate nuclear weapons in all our cities and turn the world into a post-apocalyptic wasteland. And even then a lot of people would probably rather starve.
I had an ex who was vegan. Okay, I've had a lot of ex's who were vegan since I'm more or less a vegansexual. But I had one in particular who hated talking about why she was vegan. People would ask her, and she'd say because eating animals is gross... they walk around, poop, pee, drip snot out of their noses, have blood, guts, tendons, bile, etc.,. etc,., And she'd go on and on about how gross it was to eat something that used to fart (only she'd use way more colorful langugage -- think Juno). I always thought her approach might be better than trying to have a rational discussion with someone.
At the end of the day people eat what they do because it's societally conditioned and socially transmitted.
If people thought about it, eating anything that ever walked around, bled and pussed would be considered pretty gross compared to picking an apple from a tree or a carrot from the ground. So people don't think about it.
i had slug tempura one time. that was pretty great.
America used to be the richest nation in the world. No longer, and frankly it's our own faul.t As a result, we're gonna suffer from phobias about poverty and needing to work real hard and save and eat stuff we don't want to eat. We need to get over them, because THAT'S the only way we're gonna get back in the world economy. Frontiersmen ate locusts, snails, anything they could find. They llived in windowless houses made of dirt. Our ancestors are laughing at us for our inability to bear hardship.
People eat hotdogs which contain all the gross parts of dead animals. So bugs can't be much worse than that. But best not to eat any animals or insects and become vegetarian.