Eating Bugs

July 13, 2015

Greetings from the entomivore,

Recently I was out on a run, zipping along a country road, mind wandering off as it sometimes does, enjoying the view, and then…aaack!.  Some errant flying thing, probably on its way to wherever insects have brunch, dove directly into my mouth.  It penetrated my defense mechanisms designed to keep living things from entering my body, and just for good measure, flew down my airway.

This produced a less than graceful response.  Standing on the side of the road, arms akimbo, bent at the waist, trying to shake my head hard enough to dislodge the invader in my throat, gagging and hacking and spitting.  I can’t imagine what this looked like to passersby, but I am certain that it did nothing to recruit new runners to the sport.

“George, what is that guy doing on the side of the road?”
“I don’t know Mabel. Maybe it’s that Zumba-Hot Yoga thing.  Crazy joggers. Let’s go to Cracker Barrel for brunch.”

This was not my first bug ingestion of course. Countless times I have been out biking or running and crossed paths with a suicidal gnat or a distracted fly, and inhaled them into my typically bug free internal environment.

Aside from the minor discomfort, and the humiliation of roadside contortions, there is no real harm from inhaling/swallowing a bug.  Other than the heebie-jeebies from the thought of insect wandering around in your organs until it is made into something digestible.

I’ll be honest, I remember my friends daring me to eat bugs when I was a kid and I gladly took the embarrassment of being called a chicken over actually putting a cricket in my mouth.  By the way, none of those who took the dare have included that in their professional resume.

The revered philosopher Aristotle once asked: “What’s worse than a worm in your apple?  Half a worm.”  I’d put that on my resume; that you can respect.

I have been told that we are eating bugs all the time; they are always falling into whatever we meant to eat.   The FDA allows a certain number of insect fragments per 100 grams of flour for example.  Thank goodness none of us knows what 100 grams means.

How does the body deal with this?  Like most things going on inside your body, or in politics, or at Hot Yoga, you don’t want to know.

This subject led me to a whole category of epicure of which I have been blissfully unaware.  Entomophagy is the practice of eating insects.  Evidently more common around the world than here in the US, people in many cultures are intentionally eating crawling things. Chocolate covered grasshoppers, crickets on a stick.  Mealworms seem to be pretty popular, probably because they, you know, already have the name.

There is a subculture of people who believe that making insects a staple in our diet is the future. Referred to as ‘minilivestock’.  I can’t swear to this, but I believe they employ tiny little cowboys to round up the herds of bugs to take them to market.  Happy trails.

It takes less water and other resources to raise insects, and they are plentiful and don’t take up much room.  It turns out many insects are source of protein and fat, which could make them an important part of our diet.
 
Perfect.  Except they are still bugs.

I like to think I can have an open mind, so this morning I watched a video of how to make waxworm tacos.  After the worms are ‘humanely’ cooked in a skillet with onions, waiting until they ‘straighten out in the pan’, they are added to the usual garnishments in the tortilla.  And voila!  Delicious.  I admired the chef’s enthusiasm, and I do love a good taco, but … they’re still worms.

There may come a day a few bazillion years down the road when the environment will not support our current method of feeding ourselves and we will have to resort to eating insects or kelp or dandelion fluff (which I have also ingested while running).  But for now I plan to get my insects the old fashioned way: discreetly ground up in my Halo Burger.


Hope this finds you chewing carefully,

David