From SBS Food
Deep-fried scorpion, silk worm pupae and wok-fried beetles – all excellent sources of protein. Ed Charles takes a look at Western food taboos and the people who break them.
Cows are seen as a civilised food. Insects are not. It is a division that partly accounted for Australia’s first European settlers villifying the indigenous population for their enjoyment of strange foods and grubs.
“Food intake was a very important part of situating people as not properly human,” says Dr Simone Dennis, lecturer in Anthropology at the Australian National University in Canberra. “That’s a very long tradition that we continue.”
Today Aboriginies are typecast as eating witchetty grubs. But by all accounts these fatty grubs cooked correctly don’t taste half bad, according to photographer and author Peter Menzel. “Witchetty grubs in Australia were my favourite,” Menzel, the joint author of Hungry Planet: What the World Eats, says. “Cooked in hot sand at the edge of a campfire they tasted like smokey scrambled eggs wrapped in filo.”
Other insects taste good too. Silk worm pupae taste nutty. Deep fried scorpion in Vietnam is crisp, yet gooey in the centre with no particular taste. And wok-fried beetles make a low fat protein-rich alternative to potato chips if you are travelling by bus through Cambodia.
There are many reasons why people eat insects. The town of Skuon, on the road between Phnom Penh and Siem Reap, seems to survive in harvesting large wild spiders and selling them. The western explanation is that the people started eating them during the starvation days of the Khymer Rouge.
But Dennis, who is teaching the course Food for Thought at ANU, says that the reason is probably more complex than that. “There doesn’t seem to be room in that interpretation for that people might actually prefer to eat something like this [insects] and the fact that it makes good environmental sense.That there is nothing else available is not neccessarally as good or as complete an explanation,” she says.
Menzel says that insects were originally an easy source of protein for ancient hunter gatherers. “Then when man became agricultural, they were used as a bridge food between crop harvests and later were phased out as agriculture became more secure. Then people started associating insects with spoilage,” he says.
“Many subsistence farmers still use them as bridge food. Many people recognise their high quality protein content and many insects are quite tasty.”
In the West insects are okay, as long as they know their place, outside the home and certainly not raiding the sugar bowl. “We tend to regard insects as okay in their place and there are certain insects that we like more than others,” says Dennis. “The honey bee is quite valued, the butterfly is valued. But when they cross boundaries and come into our lives then they become dirty.
“In an ecological perspective insects are not more dirty in a production situation than say a chicken or a cow. But we tend to have these situations where they cross our boundaries… they become very dirty for us in a way that a cow wouldn’t.”
In the West we are eating more insects than we realise. Food standards allow for insects to be ground into flour. Even in the US, the Food and Drug Administration allows 60 insect fragments in a 100g chocolate bar.
According to Dennis most animals are sanitised for domestic consumption.“We don’t say ‘here’s your cow’,” says Dennis. “We say ‘here’s your steak’. We have a way of making them culturally acceptible.
“I think the same could be said of insects. One of the most common ways of preparing insect products throughout the world is to grind it into a flour or an oil. Probably the way they often appear on plates is not disimular to how we make meat appear on plates.”
Few cultures eat insects in their raw form apart from perhaps honey ants and witchity grubs. Most people cook them. Dennis says that this takes it not just from a raw to cooked but from a culturally unacceptable to culturally acceptable state.
Insects such as crickets are a very economial source of protein. They don’t take much energy to raise. They breed very quickly. They don’t break wind as much as cattle or contribute as much to global warming. “They are not damaging on the environment in any way and you can raise them in an apartment,” she says. “They are very efficient compared to something like a cow. They tend to be low in fat and higher in the good caloric values.”
They are easy to grow at home and easy to eat, says Menzel. His advise is to ensure anything for the table hasn’t been contaminated by potentially poisonous insecticides. He says it is usually best to cook insects although he has eaten them raw, in addition to alive, in 13 countries.