Guest essay by Eric Worrall
h/t CFACT – What do greens do when they find a fragile, isolated and desperately impoverished nation? The use it as a petri dish for their policy ideas of course.
SAVE THE LEMURS! EAT THE CRICKETS!
MATT SIMON SCIENCE
03.05.19 07:00 AMYOU, MY FRIEND, are living through a food revolution. In labs across the world, researchers are growing meat from just a handful of animal cells or engineering striking imitations of meat, including an entirely plant-based burger that bleeds. Human eaters are also starting to appreciate a rich protein source crawling around right under our noses: crickets. People have eaten bugs for millennia, but the Western world forgot that until recently. Companies are now racing to turn crickets into the (lucrative) future of food.
One group of researchers and conservationists, though, thinks it can also use edible insects to save endangered mammals. They’ve spent the past few years developing a program to encourage the people of Madagascar—who have historically consumed insects—to re-embrace bugs as a source of protein. That in turn could relieve pressure on endangered lemurs, which hunters target for bushmeat. The goal is to build facilities to raise and process crickets into a powder, which would create a reliable source of nutrition and jobs for a growing and often undernourished population, all the while saving one of the most iconic primates on Earth.
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It’s not malice against lemurs—it’s a matter of survival. “You have to have breakfast before conservation,” says Brian Fisher, an entomologist with the California Academy of Sciences, who helped start the program. “But edible insects is modular—you can start really small and scale up to a family, to a village, to a region.”
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As for the taste: “The funny thing is that the cricket we have chosen, fried it tastes like a regular cricket, nothing special,” Hugel says. “But the powder tastes like chocolate. It’s very shocking when you just smell it.”
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Read more: https://www.wired.com/story/save-the-lemurs-eat-the-crickets/?mc_cid=588f257505&mc_eid=096fbd6be9
Nobody asked Madagascans whether they want insect protein. But desperate people will take any food on offer – especially if it tastes like chocolate.
No doubt when the Maduro regime finally collapses in Venezuela, the bug eaters will be straight in, field testing their climate friendly protein ideas a little closer to home.
All the more remarkable, because when you look at Matt Simon’s thumbnail, he looks like a classic soy product.
If you are repulsed by something, there is probably a very good reason that this trait was passed along to you by your forebears. It might no longer be valid, or it might save your life. Fear of unfamiliar big insects is one of those. Putting whole animals in your mouth is another.
Re Chocolate as a source of paranoia – London Underground trains used to have adverts which stated: “If you stare at this advert for five minutes you will see the words “Fruit and Nut”. You will then be a Cadbury’s Fruit and Nut Case. Somehow I don’t think “Larva and Bug” would quite fit.
1853 Cadbury granted “royal purveyor” status for Queen Victoria. Back then their technique for smoothness was to “melangeur” using a rotating granite pan with rollers refining the post-grinding cacao fat (cacao butter) with sugar added.
It was Lindt in 1879 who developed rollers creating back splash & slap of the post grinding bean “liquor “ (mixed with sugar) that generated friction heat rise over time reducing the particle sizes creating smoother ingredient to work into chocolate – the technique became known as “conching” in regard to the apparatus shape. Lindt pioneered adding the conching step after the melangeur step (which is probably so named from the Swiss chocolatier Cailler started in 1819).
Molded chocolate bar fabrication is attributed to the 1847 Fry family. They managed to reduce the viscosity by mixing cocoa powder with the melted cacao butter & sugar.
“Companies are now racing to turn crickets into the (lucrative) future of food.”
Stephen Fry ate one of these on Qi and spent the rest of the program trying to hack up a kidney… The footage of this has been vanished from You Tube. No doubt by the CIA , the Bildebergers or the Elders of Zion…
They are taking us for dung beetles- only a dung beetle should be swallowing that much BS. Even dung beetles do not chase their BS down with Kool aid. You have to be totally unable to think to swallow such BS.
I calculate that to consume 2000 calories a day, the caloric requirement of an average person, you would need to eat about five and a third pounds of crickets. I don’t think I could handle that. I know I’m not going to try.
How about introducing chickens to Madagascar? They are environmentally friendly and much easier to raise and catch than lemurs. By the way, lemurs are not that common that they can serve as a major food source.