Grubs up:part 2

Last week I wrote about entamorphagy – the consumption of insects- and it raised a lot of curiosity. With the constant bombardment of information urging us to ‘go green’ these days, it is difficult to bypass alternatives, like entamophagy, as something too extreme for anyone to be really serious about.
A friend of mine was paging through Times magazine in a doctors waiting room when she came across the article “Eating Bugs”. Knowing the topic of my blog, and with an interest in entamorphagy herself, she, as a good friend would, kept the article for me. What I found made me surprisingly warm to the idea of creepy-crawlies crawling into my digestive system.
I may be ignorant, but I only first heard of entamorphagy last week, so the concept is still quite foreign to me but, apparently, even in America, there are those trying to develop the trend. David George Gordon, from Seattle, is the author of The Eat-a Bug Cookbook, and swears by his speciality dinner party dish called – wait for it – ‘Orthopteran Orzo with Tarantula Tempura’. This delight consists of fried-up arachnid, mixed up with some crickets (tangy to the taste by the way) with a little pasta to top it off. Bryan Walsh, Times reporter, ventured bravely into the world of digestible insects and, he admitted, came out unscathed and very intrigued having had a fairly enjoyable experience! After trying Gordon’s version of dessert, Walsh was almost convinced. The’White chocolate and Waxworm cookies’ introduced him to popcorn-sized larvae that is meaty and flavourful and, if you listen to your rational brain instead of your weak stomach, is very likely to guarantee a fantastic time for your taste-buds.
People are more often than not put off by insects’s alien appearance, but it is important to remember that bugs pose no danger to our health, unless they were found in a pesticide-laden field, are not dirty and, if cooked correctly can be made into delicious dishes.
Go on, go green, go grubs!

Grub’s up

Thursday in Grahamstown is garbage collection day and as happens there was more than one desperate person searching the refuse bags for food of any kind. The irony that it was World Food Day yesterday was not lost on me, as I’m sure it wasn’t on many others. With food prices continuing to rise, I started to think about alternative foods and if ‘eating bugs could save the world’.

 

Entamorphagy is the eating of bugs as food and if this became a common dietary practice, we could not only be saving the world, but saving ourselves. The pro’s of dining on insects means economical, nutrition and protein-rich food that keeps cholesterol low, while at the same time keeping the pest count down and, subsequently, reducing the use of harmful pesticides.

 

While the idea of chewing on a juicy mopani worm gives me the chills from the legs up, in Papua New Guinea sago grubs wrapped in banana leaves are considered a delicacy. Rice and wasps are the Japanese equivalent of bangers and mash, and in many African countries crickets, locusts and other grubs are like the Simba chips we buy at Pick ‘n Pay. In that case, with western countries being the only ones that don’t indulge in the resources at our fingertips (or in our gardens), should we be the ones who’re considered strange?

 

For many, seafood such as crab, shrimp, prawn and crayfish are treats to be reserved for special occasions, but are these not the insects of the ocean? With this in mind, as one environmentalist put it, “to eat bugs is better to be dead and be eaten by them!”