Eighty percent of the people on the planet regularly consume insects from a range of over 2,000 species. They eat sago grubs in Papua New Guinea, grasshoppers in Mexico and dragonflies in Bali. In Western Europe, however, our aversion to ingesting bugs has a long tradition. Even the Romans, whom few of us would regard as fussy eaters, frowned on the eastern practice of cooking locusts.
Generally speaking, insects are high in protein and essential fatty acids and low in cholesterol. Despite our cultural distaste for entomophagy, in recent years the idea that we should eat bugs has been gaining currency.insects are arthropods, like lobster, crab and shrimp. They are plentiful, and account for over half of the known species on the planet. We spend billions of pounds trying to control or eradicate them, when we could just be eating them. So why don't we?
We don't really know how. It's one thing to travel to South America and eat some chocolate-covered bees as a way of demonstrating broadmindedness, and quite another to come home and start drizzling chocolate over your own bees. You could go to a place where they eat ants, and develop a taste for them, but what would you do the next time you opened a box of oatmeal and found it crawling with them? Can you microwave it like that or do you sieve out the ants and fry them separately? Who knows?
http://lifeandhealth.guardian.co.uk/pri … 47,00.html
Generally speaking, insects are high in protein and essential fatty acids and low in cholesterol. Despite our cultural distaste for entomophagy, in recent years the idea that we should eat bugs has been gaining currency.insects are arthropods, like lobster, crab and shrimp. They are plentiful, and account for over half of the known species on the planet. We spend billions of pounds trying to control or eradicate them, when we could just be eating them. So why don't we?
We don't really know how. It's one thing to travel to South America and eat some chocolate-covered bees as a way of demonstrating broadmindedness, and quite another to come home and start drizzling chocolate over your own bees. You could go to a place where they eat ants, and develop a taste for them, but what would you do the next time you opened a box of oatmeal and found it crawling with them? Can you microwave it like that or do you sieve out the ants and fry them separately? Who knows?
http://lifeandhealth.guardian.co.uk/pri … 47,00.html
Last edited by blademaster (2008-01-17 16:28:50)
