It may be hard to picture, but we may not have a choice.
Bugs are high in protein, easy to raise and feed, and … not so great to eat. But what if they were served in a lovely, palatable setting? If six-legged creatures are what we’re eating in 20 years, hopefully the meals look this good.
Though they’re consumed in most of the world, people in the West tend to be a little squeamish about eating bugs. But a new project from a group of design students in England hopes to put edible insects in a more gourmet light.
Avant-garde chefs have been trying to introduce insect eating for some time, but these students approached the question not as a gastronomical issue, but rather a design one: How do you make bugs more appealing? The answer is the Ento Box (that’s a portmanteau of bento box and entomology). Click through the slide show above to see the elegant way you’ll be eating bug-based foods in the future.
This isn’t just some tounge-in-cheek project to get us to rethink our narrow palettes. The Western diet, delicious as it is, is problematic for our planet. Giant herds of cattle are not particularly friendly to the environment: Their burps cause climate change and they require large amounts of food that could perhaps be better put to other uses. The farming of pigs is just as bad. And those are just the factual issues, leaving alone the potential ethical problems with eating animals that one may or may not agree with.
On the flipside, the protein-rich diet afforded us by those vast, unsustainable herds of animals is a hallmark of the developed world. What do Indians and Chinese do as they rise to the middle class? Start consuming vastly larger amounts of protein, which requires more giant herds of animals (and a strategic pork reserve). There is little chance of asking the world to go backwards, and the promise of synthetic meat seems a long way off. The best solution for that protein infusion is, of course, insects. Hence, the Ento Box.
Read more . . .
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