Where the wild things are: Culinary delights in insects and plants

By G: 2-25-2011

Our ancesters here on planet Earth, it is said, existed as hunter gatherers and foragers, enjoying such enjoying such delacies as fruit, nuts, eggs, shellfish, and whatever protein they could glean. It wasn't until around 10,000 years ago that grain was cultivated which produced an agricultural society, which spread to most parts of the old planet.

Some of the ancient sources of food would have been crayfish, crabs, and other crustecians, not to mention lobster, It's an expensive delicacy today that is being over harvested, and will eventually follow the abolone, which is almost exclusively grown artificially in sea farms.

That being said, I guess that the lowly insect can be mentioned as a probable source of food in ancient times and as an important source of protein in our near future. So along with learning about our native edible plants, it will probably be a good idea to learn the identification and preparation of our native insect species.

This from http://www.sustainablefootprint.org/:

"As early as 1885, the British entomologist Vincent M. Holt wrote a booklet with the title: "Why not eat insects?" It is a good question, as most of the world population does. More than 1000 insect species are eaten in the tropics, including caterpillars, grasshoppers, beetles, termites, ants, bees, wasps, and true bugs. This is probably because insects in warmer climates are bigger and show more crowding behaviour than in temperate zones, making harvesting from nature easier. It is an erroneous Western assumption that people in the tropics eat insects because they are starving. To the contrary, an insect snack is often considered a delicacy."

It's not like we aren't already eating insects in our prepared foods, especially when they are canned or frozen. The FDA allows more in our food than we think.
According to the NY Times tomato paste and pizza sauces are allowed a densety of 30 or more fly eggs per 100 grams or 15 or more fly eggs and one or more maggots per 100 grams.

In case you’re curious: you’re probably ingesting one to two pounds of flies, maggots and mites each year without knowing it. So, even if your just a beer drinker, you might consider that just 10 grams of hops could have as many as 2,500 plant lice.

I don't know about you, but natural sources of protein look a lot better than factory food.

Food Inc. part 1

Local legal coalitions to protect environment against big agrabusiness

We are rapidly approaching the era of Frankenfood and if the Agrocorp's have their way we won't even be able to grow our own. There is a movement to re-instate small farms and organic methods, but large corporations like Monsanto are buying influence in government, in our educational system, and even the corporate media.

In the farming department, Monsanto is so busy buying up the leading seed companies that the only way you can grow untainted food is to buy or borrow heirloom seed. So entrenched is this devious purveyor of poison and herbacides that, in some cases, it is actually illegal to grow organic food in your own garden.

All is not lost yet though, the folks in Chambersburg PA have formed their own legal coalition called the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund. Here's an article from their web site...

"Small Farm Extermination"

celdf.org

Submitted by:

Thomas Linzey, Esq. 675 Mower Road, Shippensburg, Pennsylvania 17257

Multinational agri-business corporations set out almost forty years ago to exterminate family farmers and take control of food production in the United States. That chilling proposition, which has been asserted by farming communities across the Country over the past decade, gained support last week with the release of a document authored by several agri-business corporations.

The 1962 strategy memorandum, entitled "An Adaptive Program for Agriculture", was drafted by a group of multinational corporations called the "Committee for Economic Development" and it lays out a detailed plan for the decidedly un-American corporate takeover of an American institution - the family farm.

Chapter 6 of the memorandum calls for a two pronged strategy, either "(a) leakproof control of farm production by agri-business corporations" or "(b) a program, such as we are recommending here, to induce excess resources - primarily people - to move rapidly out of agriculture."

One of those "excess resources" - an Illinois hog farmer named Keith Bolin - was one of the farmers who read the paper. In an interview done shortly after Farm Aid, Bolin spoke of the absolute control being exercised over hog prices by agri-business corporations. He explained that "Many factory farms are packer owned and packer controlled. And when the packers are short of hogs and they don't want to bid up for my hogs, they flood the market with their own and drive the price down. They force me to chase the market down. They use their own hogs to drive the price lower." Last year, Bolin lost thirteen months of net worth. Last month, he canceled his health insurance to cut his operating costs. Next year, he sees himself taking a job off the farm.

In blunt testimony before the Senate Ag Committee, he stated that "this is not about efficiency or inefficiency. It's about control of our food supply by a few multinationals who are not loyal to Main Street, or rural America, or the American flag."

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