Mary Brown writes in WUWT Tips and Notes:
No more steak for you earth hating skeptics. Time to learn to eat sustainable crickets… so says the Washington Post. Of course it mentions climate change.
The article also says this…
“The industry leapt forward following a 2013 United Nations report warning that with nine billion people on Earth in 2050, current food production will have to double. Between a lack of space and climate change concerns, we’ll need more sustainable solutions. Crickets happen to be a great option.”
Interesting statement since the earth currently has 7.2 billion people, many of whom are clearly overfed already. I’m not sure why a 25% increase in population would require a 100% increase in food.
Also, the USA already produces food for 1.2 billion Americans and we waste 75% of it. Worldwide, food production is enough for roughly 14 billion people with 50% waste. Zero waste is unrealistic, but I’ll bet the food waste ratio approached zero in Europe in winter of ’45.
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There’s almost no difference between crickets and crawdads. Hell, I’d bet a cricket etouffee would be delicious. Or cockroach bisque. Can’t be any worse than what Michelle is trying to force-feed our school kids.
I say let’s eat cicadas. Every 17 years in Spring in the Chicago area the juvenile cicada grubs burrow up from the ground, climb up the tree stumps, and metamorphous into winged adults. The area literally gets invaded. They’re everywhere; hundreds of abandoned shells at different heights can be seen clutching to one single tree trunk. It’s impossible to walk the sidewalks without stepping on them. Their mating calls from the forests can be heard from inside your car with the windows closed at 70mph down the 6 lane Tri-State Expressway west of the city.
When I was to leave the work force for good in April 2007 (my 23 year employer determined I had become too costly a medical liability) I considered myself lucky that the 17 year emergence of the cicadas coincided with it. I didn’t have to travel to the Grand Canyon, or Yellowstone to see a natural wonder. I merely had to walk out my door.
I’m making a short story long. Anyway, yes, I ate them. The juvenile grubs are edible if they’re picked from the trees before they transform into the hard shelled, winged adults. A friend of mine invited people over for a cicada dinner. Instead of a sausage pizza we had a cicada pizza. And he made spaghetti and used cicadas for the meat sauce. His wife wouldn’t eat it but the rest of us did. How did they taste?
He over-salted them.
Uhhh . . . If we can’t feed 9 billion people, there won’t be 9 billion poeple.
h/t George Carlin
As long as I can get a bucket of Kentucky Fried Krickets from the Kernel and two free sides I’m good.
Also I see lots of posts about how we can ramp up rice production to feed the masses, but then I think who in hell can eat rice more that once or twice a month….not me thats for sure ;0)
I saw my Mexican neighbor this morning and asked her about eating crickets in Mexico. This is what she said…
Mi marido le encanta comer grillos pero mi pitbull no se los comerá.
In a nutshell, her husband loves them but her pit bull won’t touch the things.
I’ll go with the dog on this one.
Sorry, I can’t go there. Crickets are the cutest bug ever. Second only to Ladybugs.
What E M Smith said about California’s Central Valley was true. However, as we are told by the MSM and our Government in Sacramento, we have a serious drought. Even presient Obama came out to the Valley and made a speech, and offered Federal aid.
According to my friends in Bakersfield (the southern part of the Central Valley), the lack of water has taken its toll on the farmers. About the only ones still growing anything are those with their own wells – the normal water supply from the Sacramento River Delta and the mountains is pretty much gone. (Admittedly, the Delta water had already been curtailed to protect some smelts and support the salmon farms.)
This has already lead to significant unemployment and, if the water supply ever recovers, we wonder if the farms will come back. It also means that a country that has always been self-sufficient in food will be importing ever more food, and prices will go up.
John the Baptist probably ate the seeds & pulp of the seed pod of locust trees, ie carob, rather than the insect locusts.
milodonharlani says:
August 20, 2014 at 9:23 am
John the Baptist probably ate the seeds & pulp of the seed pod of locust trees, ie carob, rather than the insect locusts.
____________________________________
Oh, I’ll bet John ate a locust or two in his day.
Yes, what?
Locusts were a delicacy at that time.
In the Sahel in West Africa, the insect of choice is a large flying ant that swarms in mating season. These are harvested by different means and it wasn’t unusual to have the grilled bugs served as snacks with your beer at the local buvette.
I’ll consider eating bugs when I see Algore, Mann, and the rest of the warmistas make them a regular part of their diet and can prove it……….
Actually, crickets are quite good. In Japan, they’re deep fried, then marinated in a mixture of soy sauce and cane sugar for a crunchy-salty-sugary epicurean delight.
They’re called suzumushi 「鈴虫」which translates to “bell insect” for the sound they make.
Some Japanese children even keep a giant species of cricket as pets; but they don’t eat those… That would be cruel and give the poor little tykes nightmares…
My hens just love Orthoptera! One of my hens eats slugs, but the rest won’t touch those.
So, to sum: grasshoppers and slugs go in, and eggs come out. We then use the eggs for various quiches, baked goods, and breakfast. This provides an excellent source of high quality protein to the children. “Eggs are naturally rich in vitamin B2 (riboflavin), vitamin B12, vitamin D, selenium and iodine. They also contain vitamin A and a number of other B vitamins including folate, biotin, pantothenic acid and choline, and essential minerals and trace elements, including phosphorus.” .
These progressive scientists, academics and alternative nutritionists are not very civilized, are they?
I have a bottle scraper that I bought from Amazon for $5. It has a flexible, rounded tip mounted at a right angle to the handle. It’s much more effective at scraping food off the side of a can or bottle than a spoon or spatula—especially thick food like chili or peanut butter. And its flat rear edge can be used to scrape food out of plastic microwave trays. Here’s Amazon’s link to it:
http://www.amazon.com/Foxrun-6033-Bottle-Scraper–Order/dp/B003D2OG34/ref=sr_1_2?s=home-garden&ie=UTF8&qid=1404741633&sr=1-2&keywords=bottle+scraper
It provides four benefits:
1. It reduces wasted food.
2. It reduces the gunk flushed down the drain (if the user washes out his cans and bottles before recycling them). This reduces the amount of work that sewage treatment plants must do. It also cuts down on pipe blockages in the home.
3. It makes the cans and bottles more economically recyclable (especially if the user isn’t in the habit of washing out his cans and bottles before recycling them). I spoke a couple of months ago to Robin Freedman, Senior Manager for Communications at Waste Management Corp. She told me that it’s good to wash out the innards of cans–and to clean all plastics too. Recyclers are increasingly rejecting dirty material.
4. Its ease of use and effectiveness, compared to previous methods, pleases the user.
Joe Wooten says:
August 20, 2014 at 10:02 am
I’ll consider eating bugs when I see Algore, Mann, and the rest of the warmistas make them a regular part of their diet and can prove it……….
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I dunno. I think Algore will pretty much eat ANYTHING.
Probably “Hollyrood”. I suspect WP is flagging every word that isn’t in its dictionary.
Shark Tank is way ahead of you here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ttehcPYX-wU
If I recall correctly, everybody in Shark Tank passed on funding. However, the publicity alone has really helped move the product: http://sharktanksuccess.blogspot.com/2014/03/cricket-energy-bars.html
James Hastings-Trew says:
It’s too early to comment coherently. I need another cup of Soylent Brown.
I don’t think they’re offering colors yet: http://techcrunch.com/2013/05/03/silicon-valley-tries-to-reinvent-food-literally/
Can that bottle scraper be used to devein crickets, roaches, and grubs? Many people are allergic to shrimp waste and have a bad reaction to improperly cleaned bugs from the sea. Not to mention crickets on the hoof have a gawd-awful smell.
Maybe we should be using these bugs for biofuel rather than using people food like corn – it doesn’t require nearly as much acreage and water, and they can easily be compressed into ready-to-burn logs and bricks or slurried and cracked into liquid fuels and oils. There is probably at least one Hiroshima unit of crawly energy in your average New York tenement. And they’re renewable.
Let them WaPo folk eat crickets … I prefer a tasty filet mignon … though that’s likely to give my cardiologist a fit, so I’ll stick to the dinosaur white meat (aka chicken).
Leon says…
“I prefer a tasty filet mignon … though that’s likely to give my cardiologist a fit”
Fortunately for you, the saturated fat and global warming issues have much in common. Both have been considered “settled science”. But not so fast. Turns out when you take away the fried food and trans fats and processed meats like hot dogs and sausage, then regular old saturated fat isn’t bad for you at all. So have your steak and butter and eggs and cream and be happy.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20071648
When I was a boy on the farm, we had a very large bunch of crickets suddenly around the house. It was sort of a mess with them crawling on the walls and steps and covering the patio. I had the bright idea of chasing the geese up to get them. The geese went after them like industrial vacuum cleaners and the crickets were gone in no time. But the geese soon covered everything with a green slimy residue of their own and they kept coming back looking for crickets. My folks weren’t too happy. We ended up eating most of the geese except for one old hen. She made the mistake of chasing an old sow out of the barn by pecking at its rear end and hitting it in the sides with her wings. The old sow went and got her half grown litter and they came back and tore the goose into little pieces. I guess mother goose learned not to mess with mama pig.
I claim a religious exemption.
I’d trade my grilled steak for grilled crickets but they keep falling through the spaces on my wire rack.
The BBC have been promoting insect dinners for a while . I guess that’ part of their commitment to Greenpiss and their EU 6.000.000€ funding.