If you’ve been worried about having enough to eat, you’ll be relieved to know that scientists have decided that there’s an easy answer to deal with any potential shortage of food. Eat insects. We’re told that the little critters are “delicious” with the right recipe, and they’re rich in nutrients. And in addition to keeping us healthy, some scientists say eating bugs would help keep the planet healthy, by offering a way to “put less strain on increasingly scarce resources.” They said lots of people around the world eat bugs routinely, and some are considered delicacies. The bugs, that is. 

When I started thinking about it, I could see eating bugs if the alternative was a slow, agonizing death from starvation. But I had difficulty accepting the notion that creepy-crawly-wrigglers could be considered in any sense a delicacy. Then it occurred to me that lobsters and crab are very good eating––and very expensive, which is usually a pretty reliable barometer of culinary delicacies ––and they are also very closely related to spiders and scorpions. But thinking about that also sent me off on another tangent.

There was a time when lobster was the food of poor people. If that’s all you had to eat, you were considered underprivileged. It was something you ate only as a last resort. Then some enterprising individual or individuals somehow convinced people that were well-off that lobster was such good eating that they should be willing to pay handsomely for it.

Predictably, that led to a whole bunch of other enterprising people deciding they’d give the well-off people lots of lobster to buy. The same thing happened with crab, and before you knew it, there were scientists saying the crab and lobsters were being fished to the brink of extinction.

It seems to me it would be very easy for the same thing to happen with their biological cousins. After all, if snail darters can find their way onto the endangered species list, can crickets, grubs, and ants be far behind?

Especially if western societies decide they’re good to eat? I can already see the potential for over-utilization of the resource.

Granted most insects are not particularly appealing to look at. The folks who are always talking about the importance of bio-diversity usually hold up polar bear cubs and baby seals as their poster children, but insects can also embody a cuddle factor. For example, some of the grubs that are considered delicacies are the pupal stage of a butterfly. Almost certainly, eating them rather than letting them hatch and flutter away beautifully isn’t going to fly with the International Union for Conservation of Nature, or others of their ilk. At least not for very long.                    

So, I’m not getting my hopes up about bugs, tasty and nutritious or not. Just about the time we start seeing them on pizzas and in stir fry, (or stir fly?) some spoilsports from PETA will decide that insects have rights, too, and serving them up on your dinner plate violates those rights.

Maybe we should just resign ourselves to nuts, shoots, and leaves. I just hope some conservancy group doesn’t decide they speak for the plants, too.