Guest essay by Eric Worrall
h/t Breitbart; There was a time when if found a dead insect in your soup bowl you could demand the restaurant refund the cost of your meal. But all that is set to change when the EU classifies insects as an approved foodstuff.
Edible insects set to be approved by EU in ‘breakthrough moment’
Food safety agencyās decision could put mealworms, locusts and baby crickets on menus
Daniel Boffey in Brussels
Fri 3 Apr 2020 21.29 AEDTIt is being billed as the long-awaited breakthrough moment in European gastronomy for mealworm burgers, locust aperitifs and cricket granola.
Within weeks the EUās European Food Safety Authority is expected by the insect industry to endorse whole or ground mealworms, lesser mealworms, locusts, crickets and grasshoppers as being safe for human consumption.
The ruling is likely to lead to the final authorisation of their sale across the EU as a ānovel foodā by as soon as the autumn, opening up opportunities for mass production of a range of insect dishes to be sold across Europe for the first time.
āThese have a good chance of being given the green light in the coming few weeks,ā said Christophe Derrien, the secretary general of the industry organisation International Platform of Insects for Food and Feed.
āWe reckon these authorisations will be a breakthrough for the sector so we are looking for those authorisations quite impatiently. They are taking the necessary time, they are very demanding on information, which is not bad. But we believe that once we have the first novel food given a green light from EFSA that will have a snowball effect.ā
Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/apr/03/insects-likely-approved-human-consumption-by-eu
This rule change has been anticipated for a while, various climate elitists have been talking up insect protein for a long time. I suspect to an extent this rule change is just rubber stamping an already widespread practice, going by some of the dodgy late night kebabs I’ve been served when going for a few drinks with friends in big European cities.
If any upmarket restaurants find themselves caught short, and lack the skill to utilise this daring new foodstuff, they could hire a few chefs from North Korea. North Korean climate leaders have decades of experience with living low carbon lifestyles, and can provide expert advice on cooking insects, giant rabbits, and anything else remotely edible which they can fit into their stew pot.
If North Korea is too much hassle restaurants could try hiring the highly experienced insect protein chefs who run a late night kebab shop in a town just North of London, the kind of place where desperate drunk people go after all the local pizza deliveries close for the night. If you’ve ever tried it you’ll know which kebab shop I mean.
If it doesn’t taste like chicken, I won’t eat it.
It tastes a bit like pangolin, if that’s any help.
Should be the Exclusive Required Food served at all COP meetings beginning with Glasgow.
COP meetings need to be green proof and present their Pie-in-the-Sky suggestions as reality.
Including on sight solar and wind with complete grid separation
AND
A 100% animal protein free catering brought in by teams of Mules
If it is anything like the flaccid chicken “meat” you can buy in a supermarket I won’t touch it, however, I suspect they are much better. Fried insects are generally quite tasty. Ants are a pain though you spend 20 minutes after eating picking all the legs from under your gums .
“Waiter , there’s fly in my soup !”.
“That’s alright sir, I’ll just add it to the bill”.
In frozen prepared food (SurgelƩs Picard), chicken meat tastes a lot like bland fish.
the day that somebody starts trying to make me eat bugs, that’s the day the shooting starts!
Please shoot rabbits, deer, wild pig, and ‘roo. All tasty. Even foxes can be eaten in a pinch.
— Novel Foods?
— Novel Arboviruses?
— Novel Zoonotic Diseases?
— No Thanks!
Kind of old news. Back in the ’60’s roasted & salted grasshoppers and chocolate covered ants were available in plastic packets. Grasshoppers were tasty, ants were like crunchy chocolate.
There had to be a first person who ate chicken. The question that plagues me is, what did he say when someone asked him what it tasted like?
“It tastes like scramble eggs.”
Presumably these will be specially farmed bugs as opposed to something that crawls out of the restaurant cellar and gets the living daylights sprayed out of it before being dropped in the nearest soup – otherwise Rentokill shares are going to go way up.
One thing I am curious about is how insects develop resistance to DDT which attacks, I believe, their nervous system. This seems to be a bit like saying that if enough people ingest mercury eventually we will all develop immunity to its dreadful effects. A couple of years ago I remember a case where a factory in West Africa which every year was losing 400 employees dying of malaria, resisted the eco-fascists and introduced an annual spraying of their workers’ homes with DDT. The annual death rate dropped to one person (still too many) a year. Not much sign of this developed resistance. The BBC even ran a programme about the case, probably the last thing that producer ever did for the them.
I believe they are also producing giant roaches for Thanksgiving and Christmas… just so everyone gets a le.
Bats will be approved next.
From the Smithsonian:
“There are many insects that are the primary or intermediate hosts or carriers of human diseases. Pathogens that are capable of being transmitted by insects include protozoa, bacteria, viruses, and such helminths as tapeworms, flukes, and roundworms. There are two methods of transmission of a pathogen by insects: mechanical and biological.”
Whilst no one is suggesting we eat mosquitos the wisdom of eating insects is surely open to question given the current situation.
There is a very interesting long slender (~1mm) free-living worm, used to be Nematomorphs, (related to nematodes) Gordius (hairworm) as I recall, which has a juvenile stage parasitic in insects or crustaceans. The one in Louisiana is parasitic in crickets, hairworm emerges from cricket when it rains, squirming around pools.
If the radical greens who’ll be the only ones bug-eating get themselves a bad case of worms, what’s the downside? š
A woman from Wuhan,
eats her soup with a bat on,
she says with a grin,
as she wipes off her chin,
coronavirus tastes better if spat on.
Americans eat squirrel. Americans and Norwegians (where I live) hunt for and consume wild meat. Look to the plank in your own eye.
Why dont you take your mindless, self serving bigotry and shove it.
By the way, in order to play to your particular choir you will not publish this comment.
I’m not sure bigotry is an appropriate term in this case.
I prefer a less incendiary term, such as, inexperienced. Arthropods, particularly lobster and crab are closely related to insects and are considered a delicacy in the West.
The fact is, incects are consumed by the upper crust of society in many parts of the world. They are perfectly safe to eat and pretty darn tasty to boot.
In Mexico, Thailand, Singapore, Etc. Bugs are usually eaten as an appetizer or snack. I doubt they will replace; beef, chicken, pork, and fish as a main source of protein.
MarieC,
“By the way, in order to play to your particular choir you will not publish this comment.”
By the way, you are mistaken. Freedom of speech is allowed here, even when the speaker has an opinion that’s completly wrong or not shared by those who are skeptical that the IPCC has the legitimacy to replace the scientific method with conformance to a political agenda so that they can build a self serving ‘consensus’.
In case you are blissfully unaware, the agenda the IPCC’s fake science supports is to use manmade climate change as an excuse to steal wealth from the developed world and redistribute it those envious of western success. I suggest that you do some scientific due diligence and the abject failure of consensus climate science will emerge.
I think the old man from Nantucket would have something to say about you, MarieC.
sweet Marie,
we could talk about bigotry & stereotyping (& racism) and parse specific definition of each to waste a bunch of time;
Or we could just look in the Mirror and recognize that those that accuse are often the ones that are guilty … somehow they subconsciously see a problem in themselves and then want to see a bigger problem in others.
I am an American (specifically U.S.A) … I have never eaten a squirrel, and I don’t know anyone that actually has eaten a squirrel.
(Although I did eat a cougar one winter. Which, from a disease perspective, is just about as scary.)
You try to make a (false) point by framing an entire country with a false perspective; it appears that you are a stereotyping bigot yourself.
As a youngster I went hunting with my dad. First thing we got was squirrel which we cooked in a kind of stew which we kept hot for days. Also cooked rabbit. Never got a deer. They were scarce in those days. Didnāt get turkey either.
Now I have turkey, deer and wild pigs tearing up my landscaping.
I suspect there is a very large cultural component in what we choose to eat.
A vanishingly few Americans eat squirrel, as their doctors have warned them squirrels carry variant CJD. Cajuns from Louisiana will eat anything they can catch. I do think having food safe insects will help chicken farmers as they can enrich the chicken feed less expensively.
Squirrels eat nuts. Think about that; what could be better for a flavor profile.
Marie made a reply quiet frank,
Including concerns of a plank
Bigotry the claim
Critical blame
But really the words were all look a unicorn!
Remember to laugh and smile, Kids. Intentional Self Harm is a bigger killer than Wu Flu. Stay happy.
Can I have the Not Wuhan bugs please?
This decision could be a break-through, as Australia stands ready to flood the European Market with a great selection of cultured Witchetty Grubs followed up with a tasty dessert of Green Sugar Ants.
nicholas, the warming alarmists weren’t happy that insects died in our recent fires, after that is the only way we could come up with more than a billion creatures, but now they ‘want’ us to eat them!
Actually, they want you and I to eat them, they’ll stick to steak, pork and chicken, thank you very much.
And fish and chips…..
or Immigr Ants
Thank goodness the UK has left the EU. We can get rid of all the stupid rules and regulations (well we could if we had a sensible government).
Bring on the beef, lamb, venison, pork, chicken, turkey and all the other proper meat and fish.
What happened to the Good Old Days in Europe when it was “let them eat cake!”?
Now it’s time to Russel up some Grubs
š
OH! Just like mother used to make, yuckkkk!
It became “Let them eat putrid green pork”.
Do I have this right – if people in the EU eat insects, it will make the weather better globally?
Well anything will look better while you’re eating insects silly and then the Green overlords will look good allocating you some mung beans in your rations. Green Deal central planners have learned a trick or two without rolling out the Soylent Green capriciously.
I’ll believe the EU is serious about us eating insects when I see them on the menu of an EU banquet in Brussels. Until then, this is merely for the Euro-peons like us.
We had for some month n African restaurant nearby. They offerd insects too, no idea of details, but I imagine locustus. They closed fast, lack of clients.
Don’t wonder… š
This is the kind of story the really bugs me.
āThere was a time when if found a dead insect in your soup bowl you could demand the restaurant refund the cost of your meal.ā
In the Brave New World coming, tell the waiter about the grub in your rice pilaf and theyāll add an extra charge on your bill.
Diner: “Waiter, what is this bug doing in my soup?”
Waiter: “Looks like the backstroke sir.”
I think insect burgers could eventually outsell beef burgers in the EU. Mealworms are easy to grow and scale up, and with government subsidies and social media cĆ mpaigns telling everyone that beef is socially unacceptabe, insect meat might become the only burger remaining on the shelves.
The EU is lost.
Place a fried egg on it and call it an “American Royale.”
Place cubed soft tofu on it and call it Bug Burgers n Boogers.
I invite you to eat my share…. please.
Beef is just too expensive in France, and also, mostly mediocre.
But we got “la traƧabilitĆ©”: a costly European administrative system that guarantees the safe origin of meat. Except frozen prepared food “SurgelĆ© Picard” with “beef” that actuality contained untraceable and corruptly obtained horse meat.
The concept of having the climate alarmist community dining out on cockroaches whilst the rest of us are enjoying a juicy steak meal, has some appeal. š
bug burgers with a nice glass of roachmilk anyone??
like the nothing like food burgers..
they can spend milions rave it up etc
but the consumers wont buy it, the few that will try it wont be enough to keep it in biz.
sneaking the ground crickets into flours as protien meal etc is how theyve started to get it creeping(crawling) into the food chain
some idiot in a food lab creates something to feed people or animals ever cheaper/more profit/using waste etc
but then like the no ceral kibbles for pets that use PEA protiens as the bulk/filler/protien raiser
unexpected side effects like serious to death type ones in dogs from heart failures follow
Oz…How do you milk a roach??
With really tiny hands.
ozspeaksup: “[…] a nice glass of roachmilk […]”
I can’t afford roachmilk. Do you have any idea how hard it is to milk a roach? And how many you have to milk just to get one glass?
Roachmilk is for the elites, not us serfs. We’re the ones who are supposed to catch the roaches and milk them so our more equal leaders can have their cookies and roachmilk.
… it’s called Almond Roacha Milk.
I always thought it was custard filling.
I will stick to Rhino Milk thanks.
The problem with “nu foods” is the elite try and use the excuse that they are a cultural delicacy in other cultures and we are just bigoted.
Yeah…
Show me a culture that eats ALL of an animal and I will show you a culture that once faced extended famine.
Well, John the Baptist ate locusts. I have no problem with people wanting to eat insects and worms like the birds do; I have a problem with people demanding that I eat like a bird because their own agenda.
baby crickets
Er, where is the outrage? For example:
ARE YOU A BABY EATER?
How young farmed animals are when they are sent to slaughter in Britain
https://www.viva.org.uk/resources/campaign-materials/posters/are-you-baby-eater
It all depends on how cuddly or intelligent they consider a species to be.
Anyone who’s been around hogs knows that most hogs would kill you in an instant if given the chance, and if no one saw them, they would leave little evidence.
Some people say lobsters are the cockroaches of the ocean, so … already approved. And yummy.
Arthropods all!!!
Roaches that I have seen do not have claws, neither do Langustino- seagoing crotchroaches.
Reminds me of a few years back sitting in a China Air airplane in Hong Kong with my daughter. Problem with the plane so we were sitting for over 90 minutes in the very hot interior with no air conditioning. As a thank you a complimentary snack was offered. I couldn’t identify any of it although I did taste some of the items. Not palatable as far as I and my daughter were concerned. Later in Bejing we hired a guide to take us to the Great Wall. We arrived at lunch time. So the guide suggested a cafe. We walked in and I saw that the tables were covered by paper. The paper coverings hadn’t been changed and there were food spots all over. Anyway we did sit down to eat and the guide (a female recent grad of the university who spoke English without an accent and knew idioms and jokes..she was amazing) ordered for us. The meal came and again unidentifiable. So I would hold something up and ask what is this. Answer was “meat” (I suspected stomach from ??) or the answer was “vegetable”. Very memorable meal. We ate and didn’t get sick so that was a plus!
The first time I visited China, a bunch of us got on a train from Shanghai to Suzhou. One of the guys had purchased some dates in the station and was sharing.
I took a couple and thought I saw something moving. I tore it open with my fingers and it was full of some kind of worms or maggots. I ripped the other one open and it was the same. The others had been munching for a while and I suggested that they look inside their remaining fruit. Every single one was the same. That was the beginning.
Favorite uncle was a WW-II USN baker (USS Marblehead CL-12) that incorporated the running roaches into the wardroomās raisin bread. Crunchy raisins.
To this day, I am leery of crunchy raisins in Raisin Bran cereal.
This reminds me of a story my mother told. During the First World War in Germany her mother was host to French occupying troops in her house. As she was making soup a bunch of cockroaches fell into the pot. She couldnāt get them out so served the soup. The troops all came back and asked for more knock knock soup. So you see, it might not be so bad. Ha,ha.
Bugs? Really?
Ok let me get this straight: The greens are starving plants and now they want everyone to eat the excess insects because they killed off all the plants.
Yea that makes sense in a weird following the line of logic way…if I turn my head and squint hard enough I can almost…….nope, squint harder……nope…..maybe if I tilt my head a bit more…..there! That speck! I see it! The Greenie brain.
/sarc
All jokes aside, what the hell is the big deal? People around the globe eat those bugs, I’ve had grasshoppers (fried with a bit of a molassas sauce…like crunchy candy), crickets, ants..etc made by a culture that has been passing down the recipes and how to cook them properly for generations. Funny how that never seems to come up…only someone looking to subsidize a co-packer in cricket granola (I don’t even WANT to think about that, it’s just gross…what’s wrong with the almighty oat now?).
But you know what really gets me about this? Traditionally, the poor ate bugs…why? Because that was all they could catch and eat. So while tasty and definitely a good source of protein, it was only because they were not allowed anything else that they found how to eat bugs. They were forced to. It wasn’t “trendy” and it wasn’t “new”. Ontop of that, we all eat bugs every day. So you tell me how harnessing the almighty protein of a cricket, corralling them by the millions to plunk out rectangular food blocks is going to do anything but decimate the insect population. And given that plants are already starving, it’s just throwing gasoline on the bonfire all in the name of an ideal Mother Earth. Absolutely ridiculous.
That’ always the same, earlier food for poors now are delicacies, frog’s legs, grapevine snails, herring.
…. and lobster as has been mentioned before:
“the meat quickly became synonymous with lower classes of society and quipped “Lobster shells about a house are looked upon as signs of poverty and degradation.” The meat was so reviled that indentured servants in one Massachusetts town successfully sued their owners to feed it to them three times a week at most.”
https://gizmodo.com/lobsters-were-once-only-fed-to-poor-people-and-prisoner-1612356919
I think the same or similar was true of stone crabs in Florida, as I heard while dining at the wonderful Joe’s Stone Crab restaurant in Miami Beach:
https://www.joesstonecrab.com/menumedia
I suppose I need to shut up on this insect thing, as I cooked lobster ravioli with a tomato based lobster sauce just two nights ago. Yummy.
Lobster was, in part, derogated because it fed on the sea bottom & living there was eating the excretions of other sea life.
Iām just tired of superiors telling me what I can or cannot eat. Or drink. Or smoke. Or drive. Or…
Strangely, I’m not fond of snails either.
Idiocracy has arrived.
EU Rules:
Insects – Great!
Chlorinated Chicken – Not at all!
What happened to the EU’s precautionary principle? How did they prove that eating these bugs causes no harm when eaten?
Insects often have parasites in them. Better serve ’em well-done.
EU politicians and human parasites are very close relatives (think tapeworms), so they are obligated to look out for each other.
You can choose your friends, but you can’t choose your relatives.
“Insects often have parasites in them. Better serve āem well-done.”
__
Wow, just like the EU Commission.
The same way they almost wiped out the honey bee population and then later slapped each other on the backs, gave each other awards and celebrated the fact that they then saved the honey bee population.
If they’re still around in their current form, they can save us from capitalist bast@rd poisonous insect protein producers in about 5 years.
plus Ƨa change, plus c’est la mĆŖme chose
The food delivery service, gig job GrubHub may just be on to something.
https://www.grubhub.com/
If you eat birds, chicken or fish you are really eating second hand bugs. In days of yore before fossil fuels were invented āGentlesā (maggots) were a well known dish.
Well I like grass-fed beef. Does that make me a vegan?
You eat the predator of grass.
It makes you a better vegan. A super-vegan.
Grass has ALOT of bugs in it. So are cows vege-insectivores? š
Noted tarantulas in Vientiane market
Truth be known, we already eat a lot of insects. They are in a lot of them in grains, like wheat, oats and rice already etc, so when eating flour (bread) oatmeal or a rice dish, it is estimated there is a tiny percentage that are insects and their eggs and their residual. So it hasn’t killed us yet and when well baked or cooked, you would never even know it. As the guy on the survival show says, when you hungry, insects are real delicious. Probably more so if they are ground up and cooked, along with a snail or clam.
I think this is more a cultural thing. To a true Indian vegetarian, the thought of eating the flesh of a rear end of a cow is just revolting, but to me, it is top sirloin steak. I won’t be getting my knickers in a knot over this, but I also don’t want something mandated on me that I can only eat insects, either by decree or by necessity. There is a place for this, and if they could invent a pheromone to catch all the locusts in Africa, they could have one huge chicken industry. Or just fry them up with some onions and a few spuds. Not a big deal from me..in fact I think we should promote the industry to raise more insects for animal fowl feed, pet food etc. A friend of mine has a cricket farm that he sells to for the pet stores who sell birds, snakes and other such critters that eat bugs. It is already a big industry. If people want to eat it, it is just another food source to me.
Before we replace beef with bugs, can we consider HORSE meat?
It’s extremely tasty, and it consumes less resources, apparently.
Yikes, I was at a very popular sushi restaurant in the Tokyo suburbs one time with a few business colleagues and they had raw horse meat on the menu. One of my colleagues said, as we were discussing it, if anyone orders the raw horse meat, I’m getting up and walking out of here. I would’ve joined her.
…… but we did have the poisonous blowfish.
Only Anglophone cultures have taboo against horse meat, and it is recent.
To the larger point, novel food sources, letās get over this zoonosis before we risk another.
Yes.
But there were just too many health issues with bad horses in Europe… Horse meat nose dived in France.
You mean that kebab meat is made out of random insects? Oh, thank God!
like fleas tics and crabs…yuuuuuuum
Don’t forget the bats, snakes, and pangolins.
The Khazarians have been working on this for a while. Keep the proles fed just enough to produce for them.
Sounds like something I’m always reading on ZeroHedge comment threads. Am surprised code talking is now showing up on WUWT posts.
Jay, as one J. to another: you should elaborate & tell us more about that settled science. Maybe even show us on a doll where the Khazar touched you.
For some reason it seems the WUWT site moderator didn’t notice what your meaning is.
You could feed every Australian one serve of either rabbit, deer, or ‘roo meat per day, for the foreseeable future, and it would not make a significant dent in the populations of these animals, which all run wild here. By comparison, that’s easier, much easier, than raising, harvesting, and processing mealworms, locusts, or crickets.
Add to this, people LIKE rabbit, deer, and ‘roo meat! No PR campaign required!
Who will head the Mealworm Ministry at the UN and EU? It comes with big salaries and travel budgets.
Eat chitin and die, globalist dictatorship!
Annually, on average, a person in the United States unknowingly ingests 11 pounds of insect and rodent parts in foods prepared with grains.