I'm sorry, what? - Eating insects

from Amazon.co.uk

This is a subject that's been around for a while, a Victorian book on 'Why Not Eat Insects' anyone, but has recently been highlighted in a BBC programme, 'Can Eating Insects Save the World', and a BBC Wildlife magazine article.  Its an interesting idea, after all they have 20% more protein then beef, but only a 1/3 of the fat, making them by far the healthier option.  Then you have the environmental side of things; with only a 10th of the land needed to produce the same weight of insects as you would beef, and far less CO2 produced in the process.  It would also mean that we would need less land to grow their feed and less land to grow them, so that more food could goes to those that need it and more land could be handed back over to wildlife.  There's also the fact that it would cost a whole lot less and less of an issue when it comes to animal welfare.  With a reduction in ethical issues, a reduction greenhouse gases, and an increase in healthy living, the biggest question has to be why don't we eat insects?

It seems a bit of a strange question when you realise that 80% of the worlds population already eat insects on a regular basis, according to a study carried out at Wageningen University in the Netherlands.  However, the ones that are a bit funny about eating insects are also the ones that eat the largest amount of beef, pork and chicken, and so produce the largest amount of greenhouse gases....and those, of course, would be us. the Western world.

(c) dreamstime.co

So why are we so funny about eating insects?  When you think about it its not different, really, to eating prawns and crabs.....hard on the outside, soft on the inside. There's also the fact that we regularly unknowingly eating insects in the processed food we eat, 60 fragments of insect per 100g of chocolate is deemed acceptable.  In all likeliness, our disgust at the idea of eating insects probably comes from the fact that we're brought up with the idea that insects are these disgusting, dirty things that we must keep out of our buildings at all costs.  Using poison if necessary.  We also don't spend as much time outside as we used to, or as much as those living in the developing world, so they're not something we come across on a regular basis.  To us their just these strange things that are part of that world we've spent so much time and effort trying to keep away from.  Of course, we could always blame our evolutionary path.  Insects this far north aren't as large, and therefore as nutrious, as those found closer to the equator, so it's unlikely that our ancestors would have put too much effort into collecting them for food.  The same is not true for seafood.  Evidence has shown that our ancestors collected mussels by the bucket load before munching them around an open fire.  Maybe it's just hasn't been in our make-up to eat insect, until now.   Perhaps it would also be too much to ask people used to seeing burgers, rather than part of a cow, and sausages, instead of a slab of pig, to be able to eat a full insects; eyes, legs and all.     

(c) dreamstime.com

Whatever our previous reasons for not eating insects, our newer, fussier eating habits could mean that getting people to eat insects now could be a lot harder than ever before.  Even in the harder times of our eating history we haven't naturally moved to eating insects, I couldn't find any insect recipes nestled in between the offal soup and mock goose in my WWII recipe book, and I have to admit that when I tried insects myself (a cricket, a grasshopper and some woodlice - I wasn't a vegetarian then) they weren't the greatest things I've ever chewed on.  Then again, they also weren't the freshest, and by the sounds of it, fresh insect mainly taste of a different variety of nuts depending on the species your chowing down.  There's also the possibility of turning them into the variety of food that we're used to, like cricket pie or mealworm burger, which could take away the reality of what we're eating. Realistically, its going to take a lot of work to get us in the developed world to be ok with eating these little crunchy critters, despite all the health and environmental benefits and I applaud anyone whose giving it a go.

Of course, if you decide this is the route you would like to go there are places you can get edible insects to give it a try.  Crunchy Critters is one and if you want a little more variety Bush Grub is another, scorpian lollipop anyone.