By Adam Rabiner
Bugs, screened on January 8th marking the start of the tenth year of the Plow to Plate movie series, asks an important question: Can eating insects save the world? Malthusian predictions of mass starvation and global overpopulation have never quite gone away. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) has estimated that by 2050 the world will be home to over 9 billion people and food production will have to increase by 70%. If true, there’s a good chance that bugs will be a crucial part of future diets.
That’s not to say that bugs are not a part of many cultures’ present day diets. Bugs takes viewers on on a global tour to places where eating creepy, crawly things is common place - a delicacy even. The tour guides are Chef Ben Reade hailing from Edenborough, Scotland, American researcher Josh Evans, and an Italian chef, Roberto Flore. The three work on The Insect Project, sponsored by the non-profit organization, part of The Nordic Food Lab, which is associated with the world famous Copenhagen restaurant, Noma. The Lab’s mission is to investigate food diversity and deliciousness.
Their first stop is the Australian Outback where an older aborigine woman teaches them to search for and cook up large caterpillar-like insects nestled inside tree roots. Roasting them over a wood fueled fire, Ben and Josh describe the flavors like the aspiring sommeliers in the movie Somme attempting to verbalize the sublime character of a fine wine. Some of the words they choose might even be the same: earthy, dry grass, round, nutty, creamy like a macadamia. In summary, it’s delicious and amazing.
At times viewers may share their enthusiasm, as Ben and Roberto do a fine job of creating sophisticated recipes that mask what otherwise might seem offensive. But other times the camera’s extreme close-ups of various worms and other insects crawling and squiggling is less than appetizing. The combination of allure and revulsion is well captured in the film’s first scene. Prancing about the Nordic Food Lab test kitchen wearing silly stewards hats, they prepare for a board member Paul, known as The Godfather of Disgust, an “airplane meal” of the 22nd century that had never before been served to any human being on the planet: chicken with garlic saffron sauce, crusted in buffalo worms; tabbouleh with locusts; dung-grub stew (made with dung beetles - double disgust); noodles fried in black soldier fly larvae fat; a chia seed drink made with cucumbers, basil, and salt derived from locusts.
Bugs tends to looks at insects from Ben and Roberto’s gastronomic, cooks’ perspective, following the Lab’s work on edible wild plants, fermentation, etc. With over 1,900 known edible insects, they’re investigating different sensory properties. Josh, while happily joining along in all the taste tests, is also interested in potential medicinal values. Everyone wants to learn from other cultures and explore the question why Westerners don’t share the rest of the world’s proclivity for bugs.
Ben and Josh are cynical of the motives of big food companies such as Kraft, Nestle, and Cargill that are venturing into the field of entomophagy, or the human use of insects as food. They are skeptical too of the FAO endorsed notion, believed by so many in this emerging market that insects will save the world. Josh tells a conference audience that hunger is not the result of insufficient agricultural production, but rather distribution and power structures around access to food and markets.
The team’s travels take them to Kenya’s markets where they bought live termites ready for toasting and discovered that traditional diets featuring insects are experiencing a revival in Africa, in favor for having fewer chemicals than processed food and possessing medicinal properties and rich nutrients. For example, crickets are a major source of zinc, an anti-diarrheal. On this continental trip they excavated a termite hill, accidentally decapitating the queen, roasted a huge, segmented, worm-like bug over an open fire declaring the results, “God’s handmade sausage,” and in Uganda went absolutely crazy-wild happy while raiding a mound of honey ants and “squeezing honey out of mud.” They marveled over how a living thing that made something so delicious did not sting.
In Mexico they kvelled over simple rustic tacos and fine restaurant meals made with escamoles, “royal caviar of the desert” - the edible larvae and pupae of ants, which sell for up to 1,500 pesos per kilo. Mexicans don’t view them as insects, just food, as people don’t view honey for what it really is, bee vomit. Ben and Josh predict that just as sushi was once reviled but became mainstream good-tasting insects might overcome their stigma too.
Not every food adventure thrilled them. In Italy they visit a Sardinian cheesemaker who teaches them the technique of casu marza (rotten/putrid cheese) discovered when maggots infected a pecorino with interesting results. Replicating the method back home in their Lab one morning they snack on this stinky, ammonia smelling, liquefying ball and pronounce they would have preferred to have breakfasted on a regular camembert.
And so Bugs goes, vacillating between apparently repugnant meals to those that look delicious to an adventuresome eater, like an expertly prepared Japanese dish of poisonous wasps. All the while, Bugs also delivers some serious and intelligent conversation and thinking about a number of important topics. If attendees were fans of Anthony Bourdain’s Parts Unknown, Bizzare Foods with Andrew Zimmern, or even some of the food challenges of Fear Factor, they surely got a kick out of Bugs. They even got to try free samplings of differently flavored Exo cricket protein bars and a variety of whole roasted crickets. Now whose squeamish?
Bugs, screened on January 8th marking the start of the tenth year of the Plow to Plate movie series, asks an important question: Can eating insects save the world? Malthusian predictions of mass starvation and global overpopulation have never quite gone away. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) has estimated that by 2050 the world will be home to over 9 billion people and food production will have to increase by 70%. If true, there’s a good chance that bugs will be a crucial part of future diets.
That’s not to say that bugs are not a part of many cultures’ present day diets. Bugs takes viewers on on a global tour to places where eating creepy, crawly things is common place - a delicacy even. The tour guides are Chef Ben Reade hailing from Edenborough, Scotland, American researcher Josh Evans, and an Italian chef, Roberto Flore. The three work on The Insect Project, sponsored by the non-profit organization, part of The Nordic Food Lab, which is associated with the world famous Copenhagen restaurant, Noma. The Lab’s mission is to investigate food diversity and deliciousness.
Their first stop is the Australian Outback where an older aborigine woman teaches them to search for and cook up large caterpillar-like insects nestled inside tree roots. Roasting them over a wood fueled fire, Ben and Josh describe the flavors like the aspiring sommeliers in the movie Somme attempting to verbalize the sublime character of a fine wine. Some of the words they choose might even be the same: earthy, dry grass, round, nutty, creamy like a macadamia. In summary, it’s delicious and amazing.
At times viewers may share their enthusiasm, as Ben and Roberto do a fine job of creating sophisticated recipes that mask what otherwise might seem offensive. But other times the camera’s extreme close-ups of various worms and other insects crawling and squiggling is less than appetizing. The combination of allure and revulsion is well captured in the film’s first scene. Prancing about the Nordic Food Lab test kitchen wearing silly stewards hats, they prepare for a board member Paul, known as The Godfather of Disgust, an “airplane meal” of the 22nd century that had never before been served to any human being on the planet: chicken with garlic saffron sauce, crusted in buffalo worms; tabbouleh with locusts; dung-grub stew (made with dung beetles - double disgust); noodles fried in black soldier fly larvae fat; a chia seed drink made with cucumbers, basil, and salt derived from locusts.
Bugs tends to looks at insects from Ben and Roberto’s gastronomic, cooks’ perspective, following the Lab’s work on edible wild plants, fermentation, etc. With over 1,900 known edible insects, they’re investigating different sensory properties. Josh, while happily joining along in all the taste tests, is also interested in potential medicinal values. Everyone wants to learn from other cultures and explore the question why Westerners don’t share the rest of the world’s proclivity for bugs.
Ben and Josh are cynical of the motives of big food companies such as Kraft, Nestle, and Cargill that are venturing into the field of entomophagy, or the human use of insects as food. They are skeptical too of the FAO endorsed notion, believed by so many in this emerging market that insects will save the world. Josh tells a conference audience that hunger is not the result of insufficient agricultural production, but rather distribution and power structures around access to food and markets.
The team’s travels take them to Kenya’s markets where they bought live termites ready for toasting and discovered that traditional diets featuring insects are experiencing a revival in Africa, in favor for having fewer chemicals than processed food and possessing medicinal properties and rich nutrients. For example, crickets are a major source of zinc, an anti-diarrheal. On this continental trip they excavated a termite hill, accidentally decapitating the queen, roasted a huge, segmented, worm-like bug over an open fire declaring the results, “God’s handmade sausage,” and in Uganda went absolutely crazy-wild happy while raiding a mound of honey ants and “squeezing honey out of mud.” They marveled over how a living thing that made something so delicious did not sting.
In Mexico they kvelled over simple rustic tacos and fine restaurant meals made with escamoles, “royal caviar of the desert” - the edible larvae and pupae of ants, which sell for up to 1,500 pesos per kilo. Mexicans don’t view them as insects, just food, as people don’t view honey for what it really is, bee vomit. Ben and Josh predict that just as sushi was once reviled but became mainstream good-tasting insects might overcome their stigma too.
Not every food adventure thrilled them. In Italy they visit a Sardinian cheesemaker who teaches them the technique of casu marza (rotten/putrid cheese) discovered when maggots infected a pecorino with interesting results. Replicating the method back home in their Lab one morning they snack on this stinky, ammonia smelling, liquefying ball and pronounce they would have preferred to have breakfasted on a regular camembert.
And so Bugs goes, vacillating between apparently repugnant meals to those that look delicious to an adventuresome eater, like an expertly prepared Japanese dish of poisonous wasps. All the while, Bugs also delivers some serious and intelligent conversation and thinking about a number of important topics. If attendees were fans of Anthony Bourdain’s Parts Unknown, Bizzare Foods with Andrew Zimmern, or even some of the food challenges of Fear Factor, they surely got a kick out of Bugs. They even got to try free samplings of differently flavored Exo cricket protein bars and a variety of whole roasted crickets. Now whose squeamish?