November 16, 2016 in Hunan, China — My amiga Kaylin and I were on a field trip visiting a rural primary school associated with Jishou Teachers College. It’s kind of surreal to be the first foreigner that a child encounters. I feel like it is my duty to smile wide and be on my best behavior.
After giving an impromptu English lesson and magic show, it was lunchtime. Our van charged up winding roads and stopped at a Miao Village atop a foggy mountain. We continued on foot passing under a modest bridge older than the U.S. and rendezvousing with the village ‘earth chickens’1 before arriving outside a dining hall where our gracious hosts were preparing lunch. I noticed a bowl of bugs.
I’ve been bullish on bugs for a while now and have munched on critters here and there2. I was confident that I would like them. What surprised me was how much I liked them. Post chow-down, Kaylin and I both agreed that the wasp larva (you read that correctly) was the best dish on the table. This experience got me all excited about entomophagy — technical lingo for eating bugs — again.
What follows is my first bug blog about dots connecting…
Lucianne Walkowicz’s job is to scour the universe in search of potentially habitable planets for people like us. In her awesome TED talk3 she explains in 6 minutes why thinking of a planet like Mars as Earth’s failsafe is a bad idea. She says, “the more you look for planets like Earth, the more you appreciate our own planet.” Instead, the stellar astronomer implores us to take action to preserve Earth–the planet we evolved for.
While astronomers are searching for new planets suitable for humankind, food scientists are developing new foods. You’re familiar with GMOs and meat containing added hormones and preservatives (if your brain isn’t, your stomach is). As demand for protein continues to grow at an insatiable rate, scientists are responding with innovations like lab-grown meat4. What if Dr. Walkowixz’s cautioning about getting our multi-planetary-hopes up echoes true in the food realm too?
Delving further into these topics is beyond my sphere of competence, so instead I’ll step back to a first principal: human beings evolved to consume a wide variety of plants and animals. It wasn’t until the agricultural revolution about 10,000 years ago that we began limiting our diets to a few staple crops and livestock breeds. Although there were not really any integral items on the menu of a forager, insects were pretty damn close5.
Protecting the planet we evolved to live on and reverting to a food source we evolved to eat are not only parallel as comparisons but intersecting as means to secure the survival of our specifies. Farming insect protein requires a small fraction of the land, water, time and methane emissions of farming traditional livestock. In other words, insects are super efficient.
Eating insects is good for us and good for the planet. These are facts6. It’s time to tackle the gross factor.
Footnotes & References:
- Earth Chicken is the literal translation of 土鸡 (tǔ jī) which sounds better than “free-range chickens”
- “I eat everything” is one of my catch phrases; 我一个口头禅是“我什么都吃”
- Lucianne Walkowicz’s TED talk: Let’s not use Mars as a backup planet
- Washington Post article “This is the future of meat”
- Information as recalled from Yuval Noah Harari’s sensational book, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
- Edible insects: Future prospects for food and feed security by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations
- Featured image is a tweaked version World Entomophagy’s logo: @WorldEnto
