Last week the Guardian’s Daniel Boffey reported that the EU’s food safety body is moving to allow the sale of insects as food. The practice is banned in some European countries, but has the potential to replace more environmentally-intensive sources of protein like beef.
Breitbart lazily excerpted the story, which was then picked up by Eric Worrall at WUWT. Although usually it’s Breitbart that’s laundering white nationalism into the mainstream, this time it was WUWT’s turn to insert some casual racism. In addition to excerpting Boffey’s story, Worrall added that he thinks the rule change “is just rubber stamping an already widespread practice, going by some of the dodgy late night kebabs I’ve been served…”
Worrall suggests that “upmarket restaurants” that want to “utilise this daring new foodstuff” could always just “hire a few chefs from North Korea” where “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.”
He then concludes by reiterating the totally-not-thinly-vieled-racist point about “the highly experienced insect protein chefs who run a late night kebab shop…”
Here’s the thing: people all over the world eat insects in various forms. The aversion to the practice in the US can be traced back to European colonizers as part of the campaign to dehumanize indigenous peoples and erase their cultures as a pretense for the theft of the Americas and genocide of its inhabitants.
Are cricket tacos any more disgusting than French snails served as escargot? Is boiling seafaring invertebrates like lobster or crab and cracking open its exterior shell to feast on the goo inside somehow less gross than a loaf of bread baked in part with a flour made of insects? Is consuming the raw, unfertilized eggs of a bird or a fish somehow inherently more disgusting than eating the undeveloped larva of a bug? No. Our tastes are shaped by our culture.
Then there’s the simple fact that you already eat a lot of bugs. Probably daily.
For example, what kind of coffee might you be enjoying this morning? If it’s anything pre-ground, then you are drinking plenty of cockroaches. So many, in fact, that scientists who study the insects long enough to grow allergic to them can’t drink pre-ground coffee because it’s filled with the remains of the bugs that crawled into the pile of beans before being ground, shipped, brewed and consumed by you.
The FDA has a handy page that shows you just how much insect filth and fragments are allowed in food. Your spices like ground cinnamon can have as many as an average 400 “or more” insect fragments per 50 grams (about the size you’d get at the grocery store). The limit for chocolate is 60 or more insect fragments per 100 grams, and canned citrus fruit juices are allowed “1 or more maggots per 250ml”.
While eating insects whole can be a harrowing ordeal, and deniers love to make it sound like climate activists are demanding people eat raw bugs whole, the reality is that you already eat bugs – probably about two pounds of them a year.
Bon appetit, and enjoy your coffee!
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