Delicious Grub

I have taken you readers here before... here and here. I suspect I am trying to psyche myself up for the day I start eating insects myself... There is wisdom in it - and goodness knows plenty of humans enjoy bugs of all kinds. And wouldn't it be great to chase that roach in your house and pop it in your mouth instead. Flushing them is too hard - and they can crawl out of your vacuum cleaner. This is a much more efficient way to clean your house and get proper nutrition. Crawfish, crabs and lobsters are just another form of water bug, really.

I am contemplating beef blood protein... why should this be any less icky?

Written by Emily Anthes

AT FIRST MY meal seems familiar, like countless other dishes I've eaten at Asian restaurants. A swirl of noodles slicked with oil and studded with shredded chicken, with the aroma of ginger and garlic. And then I notice the eyes. Dark, compound orbs on a yellow speckled head, joined to a winged, segmented body. I hadn't spotted them right away, but suddenly I see them everywhere — my noodles are teeming with insects.

I can't say I wasn't warned. On this warm May afternoon, I've agreed to be a guinea pig at an experimental insect tasting in Wageningen, a university town in the central Netherlands. My hosts are Ben Reade and Josh Evans from the Nordic Food Lab, a nonprofit culinary research institute. Reade and Evans lead the lab's "insect deliciousness" project, a three-year effort to turn insects — the creepy-crawlies that most of us squash without a second thought — into tasty, craveable treats.

The project began after René Redzepi (the chef and co-owner of Noma, the Danish restaurant that is often ranked the best in the world) tasted an Amazonian ant that reminded him of lemongrass. Redzepi, who founded the Nordic Food Lab in 2008, became interested in serving insects at Noma and asked the researchers at the lab to explore the possibilities.

The Food Lab operates from a houseboat in Copenhagen, but Reade and Evans are in the Netherlands for a few days, and they've borrowed a local kitchen to try out some brand-new dishes. I, along with three other gutsy gastronomes, am here to taste the results.

We take our seats at a long, high table as Reade and Evans wheel in a trolley loaded with our meals. We each receive a different main course. I get the Asian-style noodles and fixate on the bug I can see. "That's a locust," Reade says. "[It] was alive this morning. Very fresh." But he's much more excited about another, hidden ingredient: fat extracted from the larvae of black soldier flies (or, to put it less delicately, maggot fat). The whole dish has been stir-fried in it.

"I believe you're the first human being on the planet to have ever been served anything cooked with this," Reade tells me. But not to worry: "I've eaten some of it myself, an hour ago. I'm still alive."

THE NEXT MORNING, Reade and Evans join 450 of the world's foremost experts on entomophagy, or insect eating, at a hotel down the road in Ede. They are here for Insects to Feed the World, a three-day conference to "promote the use of insects as human food and as animal feed in assuring food security."

The attendees are all familiar with the same dire facts. By 2050, the planet will be packed with 9 billion people. In low- and middle-income countries, the demand for animal products is rising sharply as economies and incomes grow; in the next few decades, we'll need to figure out how to produce enough protein for billions more mouths. Simply ramping up our current system is not really a solution. The global livestock industry already takes an enormous toll on the environment, gobbling up land and water. It's a potent polluter, thanks to the animal waste and veterinary medicines that seep into soil and water. And it emits more greenhouse gases than planes, trains, and automobiles combined.

The insect authorities assembling in Ede believe that entomophagy could be an elegant solution to many of these problems. Insects are chock-full of protein and rich in essential micronutrients, such as iron and zinc. They don't need as much space as livestock, emit lower levels of greenhouse gases, and have a sky-high feed conversion rate: A single kilogram of feed yields 12 times more edible cricket protein than beef protein. Some species of insects are drought resistant and may require less water than cows, pigs, or poultry.

Insect meal could also replace some of the expensive ingredients, like soybeans and fish meal, that are fed to farm animals, potentially lowering the cost of livestock products and freeing up feed crops for human consumption. As a bonus, bugs can be raised on refuse, such as food scraps and animal manure, so insect farms could increase the world's supply of protein while reducing and recycling waste.

Officials at the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) became interested in the role of insects in food security about a decade ago, after documenting the significant part that insects play in Central African diets. Since then, the FAO has been commissioning studies, issuing reports, and arranging small meetings on eating insects. The gathering in Ede is the culmination of all these efforts — the first major international conference to bring together entomologists, entrepreneurs, nutritionists, chefs, psychologists, and government officials.

Over the next three days, participants will lay out their vision for the future. It is ambitious and optimistic. They will speculate about creating an insect aisle at the supermarket and fast-food restaurants that serve bug burgers. They will imagine putting packages of "beautiful, clean" shrink-wrapped mealworms on display at the meat counter, alongside the skirt steak and chicken wings. And they will dream about a world in which forests are thick, land is fertile, the climate is stable, water is clean, waste is minimal, food prices are low, and hunger and malnutrition are rare. But are we ready for six-legged livestock?

AT LEAST 2 BILLION people worldwide eat insects. Yellow jacket wasp larvae are popular in Japan, cicadas are treasured in Malawi, and weaver ants are devoured in Thailand. Termites, a food favorite in many African nations, can be fried, smoked, steamed, sun-dried, or ground into a powder. The list of edible insect species is at 1,900 and growing.

Laura D'Asaro's first brush with entomophagy came in Tanzania. In the summer of 2011, D'Asaro — a tall, freckled Harvard student with a relentlessly cheerful disposition — had gone to East Africa to take classes in Swahili. One day, she came across a Tanzanian woman standing by the side of the road, selling fried caterpillars out of a big basket. D'Asaro, an on-again, off-again vegetarian, wasn't sure she wanted to eat an insect, but curiosity trumped apprehension. "When else am I going to try fried caterpillar?" she wondered. So she tried not to look too hard at the brown, inch-and-a-half-long caterpillar as she placed it in her mouth and chewed. She was pleasantly surprised — the texture and the taste reminded her of lobster.

When the summer ended, D'Asaro returned to the U.S. and moved on with her college life until, two years later, she stumbled across an article on the environmental benefits of bug eating. "All these things clicked," she recalls.

D'Asaro decided to start a company to introduce insects to American diners and enlisted two of her college classmates to join her. They began ordering boxes of bugs from pet-food companies and playing around in the kitchen, making waxworm tacos and smothering crickets in soy sauce. "We were immediately very impressed with the taste of it all," D'Asaro says. But when they shared samples with friends, it did not go well. "People seemed very frightened."

They had run smack into what may be the biggest hurdle in expanding insect cuisine: getting people to eat it. Some foods, like chocolate, sell themselves. Insects are not one of those foods. "Insects," says Paul Rozin, a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania, "are disgusting. It's not that insects taste bad. It's that the idea of an insect is upsetting to people."

Why do we find insects so disgusting? Because they're animals. As a general rule, most of the foods that humans find disgusting are animal products, and most animal products are disgusting; even the most insatiable carnivores eat only a small fraction of the species that exist on the planet. Many insect species are found on, in, or around waste, and they're commonly associated with dirt, decay, and disease, all of which can significantly up the yuck factor.

D'Asaro and her partners realized that they'd need to ease consumers into the idea of bug gastronomy, so they abandoned the idea of serving whole insects and decided to work instead with cricket flour, which could be invisibly incorporated into familiar foods. They decided to launch their company, which they named Six Foods, with a product Americans already love: chips. They created Chirps, a triangular chip made of black beans, rice, and cricket flour, which is lightly spritzed with oil and then baked. Chirps are high in protein and low in fat and taste similar to tortilla chips, D'Asaro says, although the cricket flour adds a slightly nutty, savory flavor.

In some ways, Chirps are a Trojan horsefly, a way to sneak bugs into American diets and transform skeptics into insectivores. In the past few years, there's been an explosion in businesses trying to put the "meal" into mealworms. A Belgian outfit called Green Kow makes carrot-mealworm, tomato-mealworm, and chocolate-mealworm spreads. Ento, based in the U.K., sells mealworm and cricket pâtés at food festivals and last year created a pop-up restaurant devoted to insect cuisine. In the U.S., Chapul and Exo sell protein bars chock-full of cricket flour, while New Generation Nutrition, in the Netherlands, has experimented with a falafel-like chickpea-and-buffalo-worm patty.

Then there are the companies that are raising insects for animal feed, such as Agriprotein, which is based in South Africa and building "a damn big fly factory," as co-founder David Drew puts it. The plant is scheduled to open next year and will produce 24 tons of larvae and 7 tons of maggot meal, or MagMeal, every day. Agriprotein plans to create nine more of these factories across the globe by 2020. Enviroflight in the U.S., Ynsect in France, and Protix in the Netherlands have also built large-scale insect production facilities.

Many companies have arrived at the same conclusion as Six Foods — that it's best not to confront consumers with insects too directly. That often involves processing and disguising the bugs, but it can also mean doing a little clever rebranding. Take waxworms, which live in beehives and eat honeycomb. By all accounts, they're delicious: buttery, with a taste reminiscent of bacon. But the word "worm" can be a deal breaker for diners, so Six Foods has rechristened them "honey bugs." Ento calls them "honeycomb caterpillars."

THE CONFERENCEGOERS IN Ede seem to find comfort in telling and re-telling the story of sushi — a strange, foreign dish that showcased raw fish (raw fish!) and yet became not just acceptable but trendy in the West. "There's no question that food preferences can change," says D'Asaro.

I survived the maggot fat, as well as other delicacies like locust tabbouleh, bee larvae ceviche, and tempura-fried crickets. Although I found many of the dishes to be psychologically difficult to stomach, none of them had actually tasted bad. The insects themselves were quite bland.

The edible insect industry is still in its infancy, and it's too soon to tell how it will develop or whether it will succeed. Will we accept insect flour in our snack foods? Will crickets become a grocery store staple?

For their part, Evans and Reade reject the notion that insects will be some sort of silver bullet to food security. Bugs, they say, will be part of the solution only if we are careful and thoughtful about how we integrate them into the food system. "Insects can be a vehicle for something," Reade says. "But it has to be recognized that it's not the insects themselves that are going to make it sustainable. It's the humans."

Excerpted from a piece that originally appeared in MosaicScience.com and taken from the November 28th edition of The Week Magazine.

The Quest for the Perfect Diet

Ok, so I swiped the entire article as it appeared in the March 20th edition of The Week Magazine.... I suppose I should learn a better way to share these types of articles...

More information to support Marks Daily Apple and Mark Sisson's Primal Blueprint. We Americans have got to get away from our Standard American (Global?) Diet!

A spate of recent studies has upended decades of established dietary advice about eating fat. Is fat now good?

What should we eat?

Mostly vegetables. Veggies of all kinds and colors, including salads and other leafy greens, are loaded with various types of phytonutrients and antioxidants that are essential to healthy living. Many recent studies have shown that people who eat more vegetables and other plant-based foods—such as beans, whole grains, fruits, and nuts—tend to have lower rates of heart disease and other chronic health issues than those who mainly consume animal-based products like meat and cheese. But researchers have also recently discovered that fat, maligned for more than 40 years as the leading cause of weight gain and high cholesterol, can also be part of a healthy diet. “Americans were told to cut back on fat to lose weight and prevent heart disease,” says Dr. David Ludwig, an obesity specialist at Boston Children’s Hospital. Today, “there’s an overwhelmingly strong case to be made for the opposite.”

Can fat really be good for us?

Yes, but not all fats are created equal. Foods like beans, nuts, and fish, which are rich in monounsaturated and polyunsaturated fats, are strongly linked to good cardiovascular health. But several recent studies found that even the saturated fats in red meat, butter, and cheese can be consumed in moderation, and that foods high in cholesterol do not raise cholesterol levels in most people. Those findings run counter to decades-old dietary guidelines from the American Heart Association and the U.S. government, which stated that people should avoid saturated fats because they clog our arteries, causing heart attacks and strokes.

How did we get it so wrong?

Blame bad science. In 1970, a University of Minnesota physiologist named Ancel Keys published his landmark Seven Countries Study, which examined diets across Europe, the U.S., and Asia. He concluded that people who ate a lot of meat and dairy, like Finnish lumberjacks, died from heart attacks at far higher rates than farmers in Crete, whose fish-, fruit- and grain-heavy diet was lower in saturated fats. Critics noted many mistakes in Keys’s study—he looked at the Cretan diet during Lent, when the islanders had given up meat and cheese—but his conclusions were widely accepted because they seemed to make sense. After all, saturated fats are known to raise LDL, or “bad” cholesterol, and higher levels of LDL are a leading indicator of heart disease. But now there is increasing evidence that the type of LDL particles associated with saturated fats, known as pattern-A, are not harmful. “The argument against fat was totally and completely flawed,” says Dr. Robert Lustig, president of the San Francisco–based Institute for Responsible Nutrition.

What effect did Keys’s study have?

In 1980, the federal government issued its first set of dietary guidelines, telling everyone over age 2 to avoid fat. America didn’t get any healthier. Adult obesity rates nearly tripled over the next three decades to 35 percent, while adolescent obesity rates quadrupled. The U.S. now spends $190 billion a year treating obesity-related conditions. The government-backed campaign against fat backfired in part because Americans replaced the calories they got from milk and cheese with calories from refined carbohydrates like white bread and pasta. Carbs turn into sugar in the bloodstream, which increases insulin production and encourages cells to store fat instead of burning it. With less energy available to fuel the body, the metabolism slows down, hunger sets in, and the process repeats itself.

Does that mean carbs are the real problem?

The case against them is strong. But if the low-fat era has proved anything, it’s that focusing on just one aspect of a person’s diet can have unintended consequences. Human physiology is simply too complex for the effects of an individual foodstuff or nutrient to be isolated and properly understood. “We should not be singling out particular components in food and vilifying them,” says Catherine Collins, head dietitian at St. George’s Hospital in London. “We should be promoting a balanced diet with a lot of variety, including some lean meat, fish, whole-grain cereals, fruit and vegetables, even a little wine if you like. Essentially, it’s the Mediterranean diet.”

Is that the ideal diet?

Possibly, but we can’t be 100 percent sure because almost all dietary studies are observational and so have a fundamental limitation. Scientists will monitor the eating habits of test groups for years or even decades, and then draw associations between the subjects’ diet and the diseases they suffer. Such an observational study might show that individuals who eat more vegetables tend to live longer, but it can’t prove causation—that eating more veggies is the reason for that longer life span. Many nutritionists say their best advice is for people to stop obsessing over individual aspects of a particular diet and focus instead on choosing naturally produced foods and avoiding processed foods that are loaded with additives and excess sugar. “If you eat direct from nature, nutrients tend to take care of themselves,” says Dr. David Katz, director of Yale University’s Prevention Research Center. “The cold, hard truth is, the only way to eat well is to eat well.”

Artisanal Bugs

I am still not ready to eat bugs for my protein source, but perhaps others are. I wouldn't be enticed to invest with this Brooklyn startup if asked... I have mentioned other folks pushing insects as a food source here.

Artisanal bugs, after a Brooklyn startup called Exo began selling high-protein snack bars made from ground-up crickets, touting “the nutritional and environmental benefits of consuming insects.”

I found this tidbit in my favorite magazine - The Week - from their September 19th edition.

Pricey Protein

On my quest to eat good quality protein I am faced with information such as this from The Week Magazine and Bloomberg:

Protein is getting pricey. The cost of beef, beans, bacon, and nine other protein sources jumped 28 percent in the last five years. In 2014 alone, protein prices have risen roughly 5 percent—twice the pace of increase for any other food group.

I suppose this can assist in the general population also eating more vegetables which will help everyone with their overall health. I just read somewhere that planting a garden is like printing money - for what might be very little effort, you can feed yourself and thereby save the outlay of cash. "A penny saved is a penny earned", after all.

How fighting changed our faces

I'm afraid that I need to get back on transcribing Herb's letters, because as of now, the next letter I have is from November 1917. I am optimistic that I will find some letters between August and November - and maybe some will have answers, like what is Karolyn's last name.

In the meantime, I thought I would share some tidbits from my favorite magazine, The Week.

As it is, I thought this blurb from the Jun 27th edition was of interest:

Men may have evolved to take a punch in the face. That’s the conclusion of a radical new theory suggesting that our male ancestors developed more robust brows, jaws, cheeks, and molars for protection during fights over mates, food, and other resources. The conclusions are based on an examination of the facial structures of Australopithecus—the immediate predecessors of the human genus Homo—compared with those of apes and modern humans. “It turns out that the parts of the face that became stronger were the parts of the face that most frequently break when modern humans fight,” evolutionary biologist David Carrier tells LiveScience.com. The theory builds on earlier work suggesting that the modern hand—with its flexible thumb, squared palm, and shorter digits—was adapted for aggression. Researchers note that the ability to form a fist entered the fossil record about 4 million years ago, around the same time that males developed their thicker facial features.

The evolution of man incorporated the adaption for getting hit in the face. What a horrible commentary about the animal which is taking over the planet....

Not Fiber Art, but the last name is in my Tree

I came across this artist calling himself - Lynden St. Victor - at the Cherry Creek Art Festival. He claims to be self taught - what a meticulous guy. He claims to only have started painting in 2002. You may not care for his art, but he has skill.

Doing a little search on Google I found one of his carton images which spoke to me - family and 'the cave man' diet....

Just a little plug for an artist who shares a last name, though I neither know him nor know if/where he might fit in the tree.

The health effects of Fat

Mark Sisson of Mark's Daily Apple has been arguing this for a long time. The whole Primal way of eating has included lots of naturally occurring fats in one's diet. One should make sure that the animal fat is from an animal which has been allowed to eat what it was born to eat, not the feed the Global Industrial Complex has our farmers feeding their animals.

Were doctors wrong about fat?
After four decades of persistent warnings that saturated fats should be avoided in healthy diets, new research is casting doubt on that claim. An extensive new analysis of nearly 80 studies involving 660,000 people has found no evidence linking the fats found in meat, butter, and cheese to an increased risk of heart disease, reports The New York Times. Researchers also found no firm evidence that unsaturated fats, such as the omega-3 fatty acids in salmon, reduce heart disease rates. Taken together, the findings further muddy the waters in the ongoing debate about what’s best to eat. “These are interesting results that encourage careful reappraisal of our current nutritional guidelines,” says researcher Rajiv Chowdhury of the University of Cambridge. While saturated fats are known to increase LDL, or “bad” cholesterol, the new findings suggest that the relationship between cholesterol and heart disease is more complicated than previously thought. Researchers did confirm, however, that the much maligned trans fats, the partially hydrogenated oils found in processed foods, do have a direct link to heart disease.

I read this in the April 4th issue of The Week Magazine.

How dark chocolate helps us

Yum. We are lucky for this benefit and dark chocolate works with the Primal food plan - along with red wine....

The secret to dark chocolate’s health benefits may be in our guts. New research has found that bacteria in our stomachs feast on an indigestible part of cocoa, fermenting it into anti-inflammatory compounds that are good for the heart, the Los Angeles Times reports. The key lies in anti-oxidants called polyphenols, which are found in dark chocolate and cocoa powder as well as dark berries and black tea. The molecules in many polyphenols are too large to be absorbed through the stomach wall into the blood to be used as nutrients—which is where intestinal microbes lend a hand. In an experimental setting in the lab, researchers found that Bifidobacterium and lactic acid bacteria broke the polyphenols down into smaller molecules capable of making it into the blood. “When these compounds are absorbed by the body, they lessen the inflammation of cardiovascular tissue, reducing the long-term risk of stroke,” Louisiana State University food science professor John Finley says. The amount of cocoa powder needed to produce benefits is about two tablespoons per day.

I got this from The Week Magazine, the April 4th issue.

The Real Paleo Diet

As you have figured out, readers, I get my news from the Week Magazine. (I don't watch TV news, but I do listen to NPR. Now you know everything about me and my outlook on the world, I'm afraid.)

At the end of each edition they do a longer story called "The last word" and at the beginning of March they printed an excerpt from an article by Daniella Martin at Amazon Publishing/New Harvest. The author indicates that "if you really want to copy our early ancestors' diet, you should be eating lots of bugs." She asserts that insects are a much higher quality food than leaves and even nuts.

A favorite restaurant of mine does have grasshopper/cricket tacos on the menu. When in Mexico, I did try some salt blended with grasshoppers. But I can't quite do it. The last time we got overrun with cicadas, plenty of people talked about preparing them for dinner. Just a couple of weeks ago a caller asked Lynn Rosssett Kasper how to prepare the grasshoppers which were overrunning his Texas ranch. I don't recall her response, though all I could think of was how he was going to capture enough for a meal. They discussed if any part of the insect needed to be removed - the answer was no - and also if they should be washed. Now, how does one go about washing a bunch of insects? Seriously? WAIT, now I remember visiting the bird market in Hong Kong. There I think they removed all the wings, though the insects survived the amputation. But those insects were for the birds, not people. Though I wouldn’t be surprised if in China the grasshoppers were also enjoyed by humans.

I guess I am not yet ready for this ingredient in my diet.

Gut Bacteria

I confess to any readers, I believe in the Primal perspective on eating. I am not necessarily very good at following the tenets, but the theory resonates with me. I particularly like the Friday posts when folks write in about their success stories. I believe them. I mean, not everyone can make up such wonderful stories, can they? It amazes me about people who get to get off their medicines after eating Primaly. (A friend just confessed last night that she has been diagnosed as diabetic and now she is taking medicine for that. It breaks my heart.)

The reason I mention Primal Eating is because Mark Sisson of Mark’s Daily Apple recently published a blog post about Gut Bacteria. Gut bacteria fascinates me. I heard a podcast several years ago (on RadioLab, maybe) about the effects of gut bacteria on our health. It’s amazing. I suppose everyone has heard about it now, it’s been in the press so much. (I also heard about an experiment with sinus infections in children where they did a transfusion of healthy sinus bacteria into those children who suffered multiple sinus infections and how it worked relative wonders for the children.) I am ensnared by the idea of ‘TransPOOsions’ – a Freudian slip made by a patient of the interviewed doctor who was going to give her a fecal transfusion. Can you imagine? Insert the gut bacteria from a healthy individual into that of an ailing individual and have their lives turn around? At the time of the podcast they were speculating that it might help MS, Parkinsons, and other diseases. I will be keeping my focus on the subject.

Anyway, I wanted to share Mark Sisson’s blog post 7 Things You Had No Idea Gut Bacteria Could Do. In summary, they are:
They learn from each other.
They improve our bone mineral density.
They nullify anti-nutrients.
They manufacture vitamins.
They form a large physical barrier against pathogens.
They represent a “second brain.”
They can make us depressed, anxious, obsessive-compulsive, and even autistic.

Obviously, dear reader, you need to read his very detailed post so that you may learn. But, do take a look. It’s good stuff.