By Monica Showalter
Get ready for more eat-bugs propaganda to save the earth.
Look what’s on the menu at an elite London private school, according to the Daily Mail:
Chinese crispy crickets, buffalo worm stir fry and grasshopper noodles may sound like a Bushtucker Trial on I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here!
But these are the new environmentally-friendly dishes on offer on the menu of a £20,000-a-year independent girls school.
The prestigious North London Collegiate School (NLSC) – which counts Rachel Weisz, Esther Rantzen and Anna Wintour as former pupils – is leading the way with meals that are kind to the planet.
That’s highly questionable, given that most of these specimens are raised in China, which means significant costs on clouds of carbon-emitting jet trails just to transport the filthy things to the rarified London schoolgirls’ lunch plates.
As for the menu itself, well, it’s gourmeted-up for modern tastes — a look at the menu from one of the Daily Mail’s posted pictures shows that the girls can select from:
Crispy Chinese-style rice noodles with teriyaki baked grasshopper & chilli[sic] oil.
Sweet chilli & lime crickets with avocado and tomato kabab.
Crispy tortilla filled with Mexican rice topped with buffalo worms & avocado salsa.
Vanilla worm cupcakes.
Sound tasty?
What we have here is an accelerating propaganda effort to convince children, who aren’t always in a position to refuse, to believe that eating bugs is eco-friendly and green, and to request sustainable foods as a way of “being good” and pleasing their teachers.
The green lobby on the bug front is starting with monied little girls eating bugs for lunch in London, but don’t think it will stop there.
Fact is, bug-eating is disgusting to normal humans for a reason — they may contain toxins and allergans on the inside, while carry exposure to pesticides on the outside. It is still not well-known if bug-eating is truly healthy, all we have is human experience to go by and humans are generally hardwired to avoid eating bugs.
According to this BBC report (emphasis mine):
“Protein is essential in our diets,” says Prof Robin May, chief scientific advisor to the UK’s Food Standards Agency. “But often some of our most protein-rich foods come with significant environmental or ethical footprints – meat or dairy products, for instance.
“Some insect proteins, such as ground crickets or freeze-dried mealworms, are cheap, easy to farm, low fat and have a lower environmental impact than meat.
“And sometimes they may even provide a valuable ‘recycling’ service, by consuming waste products as their primary feedstuff, so the potential advantages to society are significant.”
Yet Prof May also cautions that some questions remain regarding the eating of farmed insects.
“The way that insects are farmed and the relatively short time in which they have been used as agricultural animals means that we know far less about insect-derived foods than we do for, say, beef,” he says.
A key question at this stage, he adds, is whether some insect proteins may prove to be allergenic or to have significant impact on the human microbiome – the bacteria and other microbes that live inside our bodies.
Which on anything else would be grounds for not releasing such vermin for consumption to the public. Call it ‘green’ and ‘sustainable,’ though, and it’s right there on schoolgirls’ plates.
There are isolated bug- and worm-eating cultures, of course — but they aren’t there based on green considerations. They generally evolved that way based on drought, disaster and poverty: For the isolated regions that do eat these crawly things, it’s usually: ‘Eat the bug or go hungry.’
Which brings us to the real point of pushing bugs on the population through its most status-symbol-oriented schoolkids: To make us poor. “You will own nothing and be happy about it,” as Klaus Schwab, who runs the Davos-based World Economic Forum, put it.
Eating bugs would make the result exactly the same as that. We’ll believe the global elites are serious about bug consumption when we see Anna Wintour scarf down a grasshopper canape at her Met Gala and serve it to all her thousand closest friends.
Getting rich youngsters to eat bugs in the school cafeteria, though, is easier, and it won’t take long for the propaganda from it to spread to less monied quarters and the politicians who rule them.
There’s ways of achieving poverty for green’s sake for the masses through pushing bugs onto status-conscious schoolgirls’s plates — just through the high cost of these things.
These aren’t just any bugs dug up from the sewers of London. They are farm-raised bugs, imported and highly packaged, making them more expensive than steak.
Let’s check out where they can be ordered:
According to Ali Baba, which sells a variety of China-raised grasshoppers for animal consumption — chickens, fish, turtles, lizards, and some unspecified — they go for about $12.90 a kilogram wholesale for up to 999 kilograms of the crunchers on this page, with a minimum order of 100 kilograms. On this Ali Baba page, dried grasshoppers go for $60 a kilogram, minimum one kilogram on orders.
According to aafeeder.com, a marketer of buffalo worms for pet gecko and chameleon consumption, but also apparently human consumable, the going price is $15.00 for 500 of the squirmers and there’s a minimum purchase of three units. That’s not exactly cheap, given the tiny size of the package. They assure customers that they’re tasty:
They are very high in protein and are a common source of protien[sic] in the UK for people! They do lack other nutrients such as calcium so be sure to dust them down before feedings! Unlike regular mealworms they have a soft outer shell that is easily digestible. These worms stay alive at room temperature. They live in and eat oats as well potatoes, apples and other fruits and vegetables. If you put these worms into a roach colony they will morph into cleaner beetles overtime and help keep the tub clean and smell free!
A 10% overcount is included for all quantities!
All lesser worms ship in a small plastic cup or deli cup sealed with a lid within the shipping box.
Meanwhile, on the gourmet foods front, “big edible grasshoppers” can be found marketed to the greenie crowd through a company called ecoEat on Amazon.com for $16.99 for a 0.53-ounce bag, or $32.67 an ounce, which probably rules it out as daily protein even for those who like to eat bugs. The webpage for it on Amazon assures that the grasshoppers will arrive fresh:
- ✅INGREDIENTS: Edible real grasshoppers come with a variety of bug snacks including dehydrated grasshoppers (Acrididae), sugar. No artificial coloring nor any preservatives used.
- ✅NUTRITIOUS: Real bugs contains nutritional content that can be healthy and excellent source of protein, fat, energy and minerals. Insect protein can be very fruitful for your health. Grasshopper bug made in salt and dehydrated in oven which make it delicious.
- ✅WHAT WE PROVIDE: You get here roasted grasshoppers in the package which has 15 Grams of weight. Edible grasshoppers carefully roasted and dehydrated.
- ✅SNACKS FOR GIFTS: Chapulines grasshopper gifts is a perfect way to expose students to different cultures around the planet. All of our insect candy and snacks specialy edible grasshoppers are made with great care, using only completely edible farm-raised insects that makes it a great fun food gift.
- ✅ CUSTOMER SATISFACTION: We carefully process our edible insects for humans during the process of dehydrated and cooking to ensure that they last for up to 12 months to ensure they’re fresh and tasty when you received them.
For the economy-minded, the Newport Jerky Company sells a “Mixed Bugs” package for $14.99 a package, or $28.82 an ounce, which would rule it out for most daily budgets, too.
Bugs are an expensive rich-man’s hobby food, now being marketed to kids as green and virtuous, yet this so-called food is anything but sustainable — any way it’s measured. For those of us who can resist status-symbols in order to virtue-signal, we still have filet mignon.
For now, at least, we already know they are coming for our meat.