Stuff the Turkey: Is this the future of Christmas dinner?

22Dec06

Taken from The Oaxaca Times, Mexico

Finally, the perfect excuse for refusing to go to that unbearable Christmas meal at your great aunt’s, who isn’t actually related to you anyway.

“Sorry Aunty, I won’t make it this year: Grasshopper Roast just doesn’t agree with me – I’m allergic to the way it looks.”

Eating insects is an old tradition that dates back many millennia. The Old Testament encouraged Christians and Jews to consume locusts, beetles, and grasshoppers; Pliny, the first-century Roman scholar and author of Historia Naturalis, wrote that Roman aristocrats loved to eat beetle larvae reared on flour and wine, and even Aristotle, the fourth-century Greek philosopher and scientist, claims that “…at first the males are better to eat, but after copulation the females, which are then full of white eggs.”

Nowadays in Latin America, cicadas (fire-roasted tarantulas) and ants are prevalent in traditional dishes and one of the most famous culinary insects, the Agave worm, is eaten on tortillas and placed in bottles of Mezcal liquor in Mexico. So why don’t Europeans and Americans eat insects despite their well certified track record?

“We invested in livestock, and bugs became the enemy,” explains David George Gordon, the author of ‘The Eat-a-Bug Cookbook.’

Manfred Kroger, a professor emeritus of food science at Penn State University, says “what people choose to eat is conditioned by culture.

“Many Westerners readily consume shrimp and lobster (which, like insects, are arthropods) along with pork and oysters—foods other cultures reject as dirty.”

“Another reason is that after Europe became agrarian, insects were seen as destroyers of crops rather than a source of food,” says Gene DeFoliart, a professor emeritus of entomology at the University of Wisconsin.

“In our preoccupation with cattle, we have denuded the planet of vegetation,” DeFoliart states. “Insects are much more efficient in converting biomass to protein.”

Hamburgers, for example, are roughly 18 percent protein and 18 percent fat. Cooked grasshopper, meanwhile, contains up to 60 percent protein with just 6 percent fat. Moreover, like fish, insect fatty acids are unsaturated and thus healthier.

Insect farming is arguably much more efficient than cattle production. One hundred pounds (45 kg) of feed produces 10 pounds (4.5 kg) of beef, while the same amount of feed yields 45 pounds (20 kg) of cricket.
“People are poisoning the planet by ridding it of insects, rather than eating insects and keeping artificial chemicals off plants that we eat,” say DeFoliart, noting the widespread use of pesticides in industrial agriculture.

In Colombia, insects used as food by indigenous populations are often those that are dependably most abundant. Thus, many of the species used as food are important crop pests. So the question has been raised whether increased promotion and harvest of palm weevil (Rhynchophorus) and rhinoceros beetle (Oryctes) larvae as food might serve as a form of biological control of these pests (and the associated ‘red- ring disease’ of palms). Such a practice might result in the reduction of pesticides, as well as creating new economic opportunities for indigenous people.

If insects were to become more widely accepted as a respectable food item in industrial countries, they would form a whole new class of foods made to order for low-input small-business and small-farm production. International trade in edible insects would almost certainly increase. Although prospects for widespread acceptance are uncertain, there has been a notable increase in the number of articles in newspapers and magazines, and the subject is usually treated more seriously than in the past.

Ant drinks are said to have been used in Britain in the middle ages as a tonic for general ailments. In 2001 British company Inter-Continental launched a version of this tonic called ‘Ant’ on the western market, as an energy drink (and, yes, it was made from real ants).

Worms in jelly or clear, hard candy, invented by biologist Juan García Oviedo, have also been a big hit in test groups over the last decade.

“The kids love them. They tend to eat the candy to get at the bug to see if it’s real. Once they find out its real, they keep on eating anyway,” says Oviedo.

Long a food source in Oaxaca, the bug movement is spreading. Farmers on the outskirts of Mexico City were spending large amounts of money on pesticides to kill grasshoppers, Oviedo said, until they found they could get more money for the edible bugs than for their crops.

“Now, these farmers are planting a cheap kind of corn, just to serve as a trap to catch grasshoppers.”

While the ideas have made it to market studies and consumer testing, they still require seed money. Oviedo says he has interest from foreign investors, but has been hamstrung by Mexican food-safety standards that treat insect content as contamination rather than a potential main ingredient. Officials at Mexico’s Agriculture Department say insect consumption falls outside regulations because it’s a traditional, non-commercial food product.

Oviedo also claims that with a protein content as much as twice that of beef, bugs could also become a welcome diet supplement among the estimated 20 million extremely poor who live on incomes of $1 per day or less.

Dr. Hector Bourges of Mexico’s National Nutrition Institute said eating insects was a “sort of return to the distant past,” but he doubts bugs alone could make a big difference in diets of malnourished people. Even so, Oviedo hopes to produce more modern, ‘mixed-bug’ products, like grinding up grasshoppers into hot dogs, or enriching tortillas with high-protein bug larvae powder.

Scientists estimate that we will probably ingest 1 pound of insects in our lifetime. In fact, the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has even set guidelines for the maximum allowable insect parts that can contaminate foods. For instance, 50 grams of flour must not have more than 75 parts of insect, and chocolate should not contain more than an average of 60 bug fragments per 100 grams. We’re all eating bugs anyway! Isn’t it disconcerting to learn that we’re not that sophisticated after all?

Filed under: Food, Insects, Mexico, Mosarrof Hussain, Oaxaca Times, Protein   |  2 Comments