As a dutiful reader of the New York Times, The Scrapbook has for several years been aware of a new trend in the culinary arts. The trend: the preparation and consumption of insects.
Three years ago we read about a startup, Bitty Foods, “a company that mills crickets and blends them with cassava and coconut.” The basic insight seems to be this: If you’re a vegan or a vegetarian, your sources of protein are limited—you can only eat so many nuts. “My vision,” the Bitty Foods founder explained, “is that we’re going to boost the protein content of all the staple foods that we eat. And we’re going to need a really sustainable and plentiful protein source to do that with.”
Yeah, and what could be more sustainable and plentiful than bugs?
Now we read in the Times of an “entertaining and eye-opening documentary” called Bugs. The film chronicles a chef, Ben Reade, and a researcher, Josh Evans, “as they travel the world to visit cultures where insects are prepared as food.” We learn from the documentary, among other things, that “the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization has reported that the use of insects as food may have long-term benefits for the global food supply.” The film “also offers cooks new possibilities for tastes and textures.”
With the animal rights movement growing in popularity, our days of eating bacon and steak may be drawing to a close. If pigs and cows have the right not to be eaten, we’ll just have to get our protein from the next link down on the food chain.
But this led us to ask a question: If pigs and cows are not to be gnawed, what about crickets and worms? (Does it matter that, as Shakespeare noted, worms eat of commoners and kings—his gloomy Dane observes, “Your worm is your only emperor for diet”?) So we searched online for the term “insect rights.” We won’t bother cataloguing what we found. Suffice it to say: In a few years, we’ll have to move another link down the food chain to source our edibles. At which point the question will be whether plants have rights, too. Gosh, we hope not.
But if that is where fashionable ethics take us, we can at least count on the Times to tell us about the hip and happening new chefs doing exciting things with dirt.
