Eating Outside the Box

By Peter Lloyd

Bored with your regular diet? Pinched by the rising price of groceries? You can bring innovation and creativity into your daily cuisine with a nutritious food that's better for you than red or white meat, easy to prepare, cheap and plentiful.

It's eaten in more than a hundred countries. You've already sampled it without even realizing it. And yet when most of us see even the tiniest hint of this food in our corn flakes, we recoil in disgust.

No doubt you've figured out that I'm talking about insects.

Why do we balk at the idea of eating insects? The following creativity experiment might help explain.

1. Give someone a small cup.
2. Give them ten seconds to fill the cup with their own saliva.
3. Then ask them to drink the contents.

As you might imagine, most people asked to drink their own saliva refuse. Even though it was just in their mouth a few seconds ago. Forgive me for bringing it to your attention, but we swallow it all day long.

We also eat the ocean's version of insects--shrimp, lobster, crab. And these guys eat garbage. Insects, on the other hand, eat vegetation. They're essentially vegans.

According to Science News "Insects: The Original White Meat," many insects deliver vitamins, minerals, and good fatty acids, as well as essential amino acids lysine and tryptophan. Some people go out of their way to buy these kinds of ingredients in bottles of pills at health and wellness centers.

So why do we steer clear of things that not only can’t hurt us, but also from those that can help? Because just as certainly as our culture, customs, mores, and arbitrary ways of doing things offer us innumerable advantages, they also shackle us.

Idea! World hunger? Instead of spraying insecticides, what about attracting, bagging, processing, storing, and shipping agricultural pests as emergency food relief to starving masses?

Dig Deeper: Ecological Implications of Minilivestock: Potential Of Insects, Rodents, Frogs And Snails

Escargot anyone?

Peter Lloyd is co-creator with Stephen Grossman of Animal Crackers, the breakthrough problem-solving tool designed to crack your toughest problems.

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