Nobody Likes Me, Everybody Hates Me…

…I guess I’ll go eat worms.

Or, at least, that’s what the author of this article from The Huffington Post would suggest.

In the vast world of environmentalism, hybrid cars and bicycle lanes are to transportation what bugs and roadkill are to food — the great answers to the problem of finding sustainable energy for moving our bodies.

I remain unconvinced.

Let’s take, for example, a few choice morsels from the article, entitled “Who Needs Meat When You’ve Got Bugs?“, and dissect them if you will:

The Feral Forager, a self-published ‘zine excerpted in Sandor Katz’s The Revolution Will Not Be Microwaved, rebrands pill bugs as “land shrimp”; grasshoppers are “surprisingly tasty and filling” and taste “something like popcorn”; crickets, “incredibly high in calcium and potassium.” Roasted grubs make a fat-filled protein snack that, again, tastes “a lot like popcorn.”

I’ve always thought that lobster and shrimp look exactly like insects — namely, cockroaches — anyway.  We’re already halfway there with our love of crustaceans.  Would any of this really be that different?

I mean, we already eat and love mollusks, as it is, and those are creatures whose entire source of food comes from filtering sea water.  Or, as Wikipedia so poetically describes it, they “…draw water in over their gills through the beating of cilia. Suspended food plankton and particles are trapped in the mucus of a gill, and from there are transported to the mouth, where they are eaten, digested and expelled as feces or pseudofeces.” Lovely thought.

Then, however, there is this:

As the Feral Forger notes, “picking up roadkill is a good way to get fresh, wild, totally free-range and organic meat for absolutely free.”

Really?  Free-range and organic?  I beg to differ.  Let’s count the number of things that I saw dead and flattened on the side of the road this weekend during my trip to DFW and back:

1. Armadillos
2. Skunks
3. Possums
4. Raccoons
5. Squirrels
6. Various breeds of dog
7. Coyotes
8. Unrecognizable carcasses of indeterminate origin

And now let’s count the number of things on that list that normal people (including your adventurous blogger herself) would eat:

1. None of the above

I mean, okay…  Those skunks and raccoons and possums are wild as all get out, but I don’t know about “free-range” or “organic” (I mean, the damned things subsist on grass and old Twinkies and cigarette butts, for God’s sake) and I sure as hell wouldn’t classify those remains as “fresh,” even on the side of I-45 on a crisp February day.

Moving on to the final argument:

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in the United States and similar regulatory agencies elsewhere all permit a surprising number of “insect parts” in a given weight of packaged food because it is impossible to remove all of the insects during processing, especially in plants.

Ah.  The old “You’re Already Eating It, Whether You Know It Or Not, So You Might As Well Just Keep Going” argument.  It’s a winner almost every time.

The Huffington Post has spoken: give up now, people.  A generation from now, your children and grandchildren will be enjoying tasty Chocolate Chirpie Chip Cookies and Mealworm Fried Rice, laughing at your “old-fashioned” resistance to the charms of grasshoppers and grubs.

*shudder*