Wing Night
~ This article first appearaed in the Leader Vindicator newspaper. ~
Here’s a fun brain game: Let’s pretend you have a kennel, and I have a dog that reproduces as though it were a bacterium, splitting in two once every minute and creating progeny that will do the same. I’ll stop by tomorrow at 11am to deliver the dog into your care. We know your kennel will be full at Noon.
What time will your kennel reach half capacity?
At 11:59am, just one minute before maximum capacity. A four-fold expansion of your space would be half full of dogs again at 12:01. By 12:02 your four-times larger kennel would be full and poised for total collapse.
In other words, while caring for my fecund canine for one hour, you’d experience fifty nine minutes of bliss, comfortably below the critical threshold of your kennel, and then in three minutes the whole system would be obliterated, despite your best efforts to expand.
People don’t split in two like bacteria – we have more fun – but our population is indeed expanding at a rate that is difficult for our minds to fathom. Problems surrounding natural resource availability will accelerate rapidly as our kennel – Earth – reaches capacity. Many of these problems will startle us, slamming at the last minute into our reality that only moments before seemed quite comfortable.
Food is a debate surrounding this predicament. The tech sector believes that artificial food alternatives will ‘cure’ the problem. Fake meats and vegetarianism are heralded as the intellectual’s option to curb global collapse.
I’m quite opposed to the alternative meat-free movement. Meats can be procured from natural landscapes without much loss of useful energy. Artificial tech foods cannot. Simple as that.
There is one alternative food source that has my attention: Insects.
Yeah, I cringe at the thought, too. But let’s unpack this idea. It is no more ridiculous than thinking that a computer billionaire can create food that supersedes nature.
Insects outweigh us. According to an article by Kathy Garvey on the University of California’s website, people in the United States, evenly distributed, represent 14 pounds of biomass per acre. Insects tip the scales at 400 pounds per acre. Most of that insect biomass is a really great source of nourishment.
Bugs are a wonderful source of protein. Many are excellent sources of calcium. Diners can enjoy the benefits of amino acids, vitamins, and iron from their counterculture eating habits. Ants help regulate cholesterol and manage diabetes. Crickets improve natural gut bacteria and reduce inflammation. Pill bugs are extremely high in calcium, magnesium, sodium, iron, and copper.
Insects taste good, too: Crickets will take on the flavor of whatever they’re eating, so a cricket-farmer can produce a range of sweet to savory crickets. Dragonflies, dipped in batter and fried in coconut oil, taste like soft-shell crab. Cooked grubs reportedly taste like roasted chicken. Pill bugs can be ground and used as a soy sauce alternative. Termites, toasted in a skillet, go well with cold beer. Various kinds of ants each possess their own unique flavor, variations of a vinegary sweet-sour pop (Brazilians say they’re minty).
So, are you salivating yet?
Me neither. It’s no secret that American cuisine avoids bugs like…well, like bugs. That’s a major hurdle to overcome, but it is one worth jumping simply for the fact that we’re sitting here wasting so much domestic food potential. We can either be forced some day into eating bugs for survival, or we can get in on the action ahead of time.
One of the best methods to de-stigmatize insect food is to disguise the ingredient. As one article notes, eating grasshoppers or crickets is a little rough when you’re getting poked by legs and wings. To solve the problem, companies are turning the bugs into powder and serving them in the form of protein bars. EXO out of Texas and Chapul from Utah are two start-ups targeting fitness mongers seeking quality non-plant protein. Boston-based Six Foods turns crickets into flour for chips and tortillas. A one pound bag of cricket powder goes for $39 on EXO’s website. Chapul’s cricket flour is $45 per pound. We sell ground beef for $5 per pound. Hmm.
When I walk through our pastures this time of year, grasshoppers fan out in front of me in such large numbers that it looks like the ground is shifting before my steps. I wonder what additional market opportunities we could create by harvesting these bugs and selling them as roasting hoppers? If the consumer market existed, local farmers could most certainly bolster income from wild insects or by constructing small grow houses for crickets, ants, mealworms, etc, creating serious protein from waste foods and a small amount of water. Imagine walking through the farmer’s market and picking up chocolate-dipped ants and garlic crickets.
Unfortunately, government is poking into the marketplace to make sure bugs are ‘safe’ before approving them for sale. The complexity and expense of bureaucracy will smother most small-scale opportunity, as it already has done to meat packing, milk sales, bake sales, and canned produce sales. But maybe, in the not-so-distant future, we’ll learn to sidestep the goons and collect bugs for home use.
I can see it now: Relaxing by a fire with my family, sipping a beer and munching away on fried grasshoppers, picking parts out of my teeth between bites…
Gives a whole new meaning to ‘wing night’, huh?
Sources for Wing Night:
Garvey, K. (2008, December 15). We’re Outnumbered [blog post]. Retrieved from https://ucanr.edu/blogs/blogcore/postdetail.cfm?postnum=877
Administrator. Edible Insects And Their Health Benefits. Health Prep. Retrieved from https://healthprep.com/fitness-nutrition/9-edible-insects/?utm_source=bing&utm_medium=search&utm_campaign=370437808&utm_content=1268837100947640&utm_term=eating+insects+for+food
LeBlanc, R. (2019, October 14). Edible Insects as a Sustainable Food Alternative. The balance small business. Retrieved from https://www.thebalancesmb.com/edible-insects-as-sustainable-food-alternatives-4153360