Experiments in Entomophagy

Flax seed and field cricket broccoli.

Those of you who found your way here from my other blogs probably are already aware that one of my personal projects reducing my environmental impact on the planet is entomophagy... in other words, I eat bugs.

There's a reason that it's progressed to this, and I'd like to share it with you.  When I was a Sophomore studying to get my Bachelor's degree, I decided to go vegan.  This seemed to work well for a while before it became evident that this was not good for my tag-team compliment of gastrointestinal issues and food addiction.  My trigger foods--foods that resulted in me overeating to the point where I literally could not pack anything else into my stomach--were plentiful on a vegan diet, and many of those same foods made me buckle in pain when I went to go lay down at night.  After three years of this I added dairy and eggs back into my diet, and after four more I began eating meat again, in the context of a paleo diet.  Provided I don't relapse into my food addiction behaviors, these symptoms have mostly went away.

It presented a problem environmentally, though.  First I need to mention that it's the height of missing-the-point to believe that paleo eaters are responsible for a higher ecological footprint than other omnivores.  There are two main reasons for that:

1. We don't necessarily eat more meat than other omnivores.
2. We are culturally more inclined to pick more sustainable meat, like grassfed, pastured, and/or organic.

Still, a lot of us eat beef, which time and time again is showing to be one of (if not the) biggest environmental liabilities; releasing ample greenhouse gases, involving a huge amount of industrial monocrops like commercial maize if you're not going grassfed (lamb, I hear, is worse... but in the United States we rarely eat it).  Even switching from beef to pork is significantly more environmentally friendly than beef.  So although I still eat it occasionally, I'm striving to eat much less of it, both by eating less meat in general (I've been on paleo long enough that the novelty of eating meat-meat-and-more-meat is gone anyway) and by changing what meat I eat.

I've also been dealing with financial stress, so I decided to go a direction I'd been flirting with for a while, which is to... well, start eating bugs.  As an individual at least, this is significantly more sustainable because I live on a four-acre patch of only lightly developed property, loaded to the brim with ample edible "weeds" in addition to our personal orchard, and part of that is a serious abundance of insects.

To be honest?  I'm still getting used to them.  Although they are so plentiful you literally can't step without being within an inch of a cricket, it's difficult to catch them in large quantities.  I've basically been brushing them five or six at a time into a bucket, and from that bucket to a bag, until I get enough for it to not look utterly ridiculous in the freezer.  For some context, it took two days of collecting for about an hour each day to get enough crickets to make maybe three tablespoons of crunchy roasted crickets.  These crispy crickets actually taste really good.  They're kind of like potato chips with a grassy, shrimpy flavor that's very receptive to almost any seasoning.  But I have yet to seriously get over the fact that I am eating a cricket!

Regardless of the ick factor, provided you do not over-harvest* and especially if you're somewhere that's practically infested with them like I am, insects are a lot more sustainable than fish, mammal, or fowl, with very little extra impact.  So I'll be working on incorporating more insects into my diet with the intent to make it a noticeable and viable part of my diet.




* - In the future, if entomophagy really takes hold and sticks, maybe over-harvesting will be a problem.  I, personally, go by the method I learned in the Eat-a-Bug Cookbook by David Gordon:  Only harvest an insect if you're sure there are at least twenty more in that area for each one you take.