Nope, you don’t need new glasses – there really is a wave of new products emerging onto the market selling insects in a variety of forms, from organic roasted cricket flour to chocolate cherry insect brownies.
If you’re a health foody, you’ll be interested to discover that there are a number of health and nutritional benefits to the food, being low in levels of complex fat and full of protein.
And all reality television lovers will know that I’m A Celebrity… Get Me Out Of Here! is back on TV screens in the UK, and with it comes a multitude of cringe-worthy, watch-through-your-finger moments of celebrities eating all sorts of unusual animal parts from kangaroo testicles to insects such as beetles and spiders.
But is this really so shocking? Eat Grub, a food company looking to bringing insects to the masses, use the witty slogan ‘2 billion people enjoy insects globally… be different, join the crowd’. Is our reaction to such foods not just an example of social conditioning? After all, fried spiders are a delicacy in many parts of the world. Half of us aren’t even sure what we’re eating when we tuck into a hamburger after a night out, so why the repulsion against an organic, natural ingredient such as an insect?
Our very own designer, Paolo, has tried fried crickets on his travels around Borneo and likened them to a mixture of whitebait with a chicken-like texture. Would you be prepared to give this kind of food a try?
How about if it came in the form of spicy grasshoppers with beansprouts, buffalo worm macaroni cheese or cricket and mushroom stroganoff?
And I’ll leave you with a joke (it is Christmas after all). What’s a bug’s favourite sport?
Cricket.
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