As school kids, our angry retort to each other would often
be, “I hope you eat a bug and die.” Is this what the UN is telling the world?
After all, they predict that by 2050 there will be some 9 billion people on the
planet. That’s 2 billion more than we now have. And every one of those 9
billion people will be addicted to food.
Sure, feeding that many people will be a problem. Contrary
to the belief of many city folks, food doesn’t originate at the grocery store.
It all comes from land – arable land or water. With 9 billion people, that resource is bound to become a scarce commodity. At what point do we get serious about controlling the population?
Nearly every country has a certain population that are either starving or on the brink of it. Many already include insects in their diet. The FAO report states that, “it is estimated that insect-eating is practiced regularly by at least 2 billion people worldwide. More than 1900 insect species have been documented in literature as edible, most of them in tropical countries. The most commonly eaten insect groups are beetles, caterpillars, bees, wasps, ants, grasshoppers, locusts, crickets, cicadas, leaf and planthoppers, scale insects and true bugs, termites, dragonflies and flies.”
I suspect there aren’t many of those 2 billion entomophagers in our country. You don’t often see cans of caterpillars and buckets of beetles on the supermarket shelves, unless they are in the process of being closed down by the local health department.
As repulsive as the thought of eating insects may be to most
of us, they are apparently nutritious. The UN report even talks about
disguising the fact that they are bugs by grinding them up and mixing then with
other foods. Don’t we have laws against that? The Food and Drug Administration
regulates how many insect parts can now go into our food. If the UN gets their
wish, that number could go to 100-percent.
I am a confirmed omnivore, but the “omni” doesn’t include
intentionally devouring insects. I like meat – red meat, white meat, fowl –
it’s all good. I even cringe at the thought of veggie-burgers, and tofu. Now they
want us to eat bugs! Enough! Quit messing with food! I can’t even imagine what
wine goes with grasshoppers or beetles.
The next time you see cockroaches in a restaurant they may
actually be on the menu, and the old gag about complaining to the waiter about
a fly in your soup will no longer be funny. I have little doubt that school
cafeterias would be lonely places with termites and dragonflies as lunch
staples.
Once again, and in true form, the United Nations has come up with an absurd one-size-fits-all notion that is bound to fail.
No comments:
Post a Comment