Gourmet Entomophagy

Sushi anyone?         photo: thepirata.com

  Check out the latest in sushi for the adventurous!  The new hot trend in dining is bug food and I mean let’s nosh on those pesky little critters. This should be good news for you folks that live in the warmer, insect challenged locations if you’re bored of gator bits and swamp salad. According to Radio Amsterdam:

We want to continue eating animal proteins and if we have a growing world population, we can’t continue consuming the same amount of “regular” meat. In Europe and North America, we eat about 80 kilos of meat per person per year, and you can’t feed a growing population on that. So you have to search for other animal protein sources. Insects are a very good, very efficient alternative and they don’t have the problems of other animal production.

But what happens when you start to replace mass-production of beef, pork, and chicken with mass-production of insects? Will the animal-rights activists start protesting?

 

Wikipedia states:

Entomophagy can be divided into two categories: insects used as a source of nutrients and insects as condiments. Some insects are eaten as larvae or pupae, others as adults. Though not insects, arachnids such as spiders, tarantulas and scorpions are also eaten. A total of 1417 species of insects have been recorded as being eaten by over 3000 ethnic groups. These include 235 species of butterflies and moths, 344 species of beetles, 313 species of ants, bees and wasps as well as 239 species of grasshoppers, crickets and cockroaches, amongst others. Other commonly eaten insects are termites, cicadas and dragonflies. Insects are known to be eaten in 80% of the world's nations.

This could be the beginning of a new food group although in Canada we like to think that beer is the fifth food group which is why we get “Molson muscles”. The funny thing is that you're already eating insects in your regular diet since the government allows a certain percentage of insect parts in food. Anyone for a tarantulapop?