I.V.M. To dive right into what is going to be an interesting, if slightly unsettling subject. Do you guys know what entomophagy is? I don't know, but I would say maybe a bunch of videos would run an anti-gay rights movement to end homo phagy.
Oh my god. It sounds like some kind of affliction that causes your toe and finger or the nail or something. Not exactly, Narayan, but you're kind of in the ballpark of the horrifying that this can be. So entomophagy has Greek origins, as is true with most words in the pilfering thief that is the English language.
Entomon. The English empire itself, actually. Entomon is Greek for insect and phagian means to eat. Oh, I know, I know, eating insects.
Yes, it is exactly the human use of insects as food. Or, alternately, eating cockroaches off walls for the lulls. But insects have been a regular part of the diet on every continent in the world. Over 3,000 ethnic groups practice entomophagy, with a food and agriculture organization recognizing over 1,900 species as edible.
1,900 species of insects, that itself is good. But then why do the majority of us go eat instead of yum when it goes to insects? That's just the Western world and the subsequent outlook. There are about an estimated 2 billion insect consumers worldwide.
That's just under a third of the world's population. There are a large number of cultures that embrace the eating of insects. The species include 235 butterflies and moths, 344 beetles, 330 ants, bees and wasps, 239 grasshoppers, crickets and cockroaches, 39 termites and 20 dragonflies. Wow, that's almost as many bugs as Apple Maps had when it was.
Speaking of misleading information, everyone in the so-called civilized world already eats quite a lot of bugs. Canned fruit juices are allowed up to 1 maggot per 250 ml, so that's, please take note. Curry powder is allowed up to 100 insect fragments, head, body, legs, per 25 grams. And chopped dates are allowed up to 10 whole dead insects.
When we here on Simplified did that microbrewery episode, we gave all kinds of information on the process. There was one choice nugget that we didn't really reveal. The acceptable limit of insect infestation in hops, the flavoring agent for beer, is 2,500 aphids of plant lice per 10 grams. Oh, wow, okay, that is a little terrifying and unsettling.
But then again, there are a whole bunch of myths on what is gross or not. Like, it's considered unthinkable to share toothbrushes, but perfectly fine to share earphones, which is almost as bad with all the bacteria that's transmitted, right? Exactly, and the bugs are nutritious. Insects actually have high fat, protein, vitamin, fiber and mineral content that is often comparable to fish or livestock.
Termites are surprisingly protein-rich. One species found in Venezuela is 64% protein. Some insects are even as much as 80% protein by weight. That's spectacularly high, right?
Yeah, more than meat. More than meat, that's more than whey protein. I know, man, yeah. I mean, insects are also rich in essential amino acids and omega-3 fatty acids.
Mealworms contain as much unsaturated omega-3 and 6 fatty acids as fish and even more than beef and pork. Some are also surprisingly high in iron. Locusts contain up to 20 mg per 100 g of iron, and mupin and caterpillars contain a mighty 31 mg per 100 g, whereas beef only contains 6 mg per 100 g. Tell me, you know all these facts off the back of your head.
Of course, yeah. I mean, who doesn't know? I mean, anyway, I have Wikipedia tattooed to the back of my head, so therefore it is there. Isn't that some part?
Isn't it horrible how it always works out that things that look and taste terrible are always great for you? Why can't ice cream be good for you? Or bacon, for the matter? Some life-altering amino acid or squatch and some power, that's immune from...
It's always, yeah, it always has to be something disgusting. Conversely, like something that looks... Like, for example, petal. Like, you would always...
If someone comes and tells you that, yeah, you know, now petal is edible, you'd be like, yeah, I wouldn't mind buzzing down a gallon of that. It's fine, I think it's a required taste, we can do that. But no, petal has to be like, oh, God, you drink it and set fire to yourself kind of scenario. But otherwise, everything else is like...
Also, while worms are good for you, they are also great for the environment. Insects are cold-blooded and thus require less energy to maintain their internal body temperature. This means that they're very efficient in converting feed into edible body mass, unlike cattle. Yeah, they're famously inefficient in terms of converting grass into edible meat.
So the main insect that can be the most nutritious and no wonder it's the most unpopular in the West is cricket. Crickets, actually. I wonder if they're regulated by the BCC as well. They're in teaching them all, like, all of them yellow and call them Chennai Superbots.
Crickets require around 2kg of feed to produce 1kg of meat, which is around 80% edible. Cattle, on the other hand, require 8kg to produce the same amount of meat, but only 40% of the cow can be consumed. This means that less land needs to be dedicated for growing feed for insects than for livestock, reducing irrigation and pesticide use. Also, the farmland covers 30% of our planet, with most of it being used to rare cattle.
Insect farming, on the hand, can be done in labs. I can honestly imagine the conversation. This beaker has sulfuric acid, this one has ammonium nitrate, and that one has lunch. What am I going to do with the garnishing of cattle to the hair?
Also, with cattle farming, there is a minor problem of bovine flatulence, commonly known as cow farting, which is the leading source of greenhouse emissions. Farm animals fart so much methane that it contributes up to 18% of all greenhouse gases. I don't think this little fact is very widely known, is it? I didn't know it.
I mean, 18% is actually more... I always say it's cars or whatever evil... Yeah, the 18% is more than cars, trucks, planes, and all other forms of transportation. It's like you could go up to a car and say, your mama farts so bad she put a hole in the ozone layer and actually be significantly accurate.
Yeah, I mean, whereas the amount of ammonia produced by farmed insects is a fraction of what farm animals produce. But insects taste horrible, don't they? We've all had the occasional insect fly into our mouth and it's very disgusting. I saw a lot of flies.
Yeah, I mean, those may rain to some extent, but properly farmed insects have a variety of very desirable tastes. Some termites in Africa have a pleasantly minty flavor. Grasshoppers are often served in Mexico, roasted in garlic and chili. I've seen them in Thailand too.
Stinkbugs may have a foul odor, but they may actually taste like apples. And for more capsaicinally inclined people, I can chuck, red agave worms are meant to be spicy. And tree worms supposedly taste a bit like ocrine. And with the flavors, people have to think, I'm sure we could have wasabi flies or, I don't know, teriyaki or something.
So the famous 1965 tour of America by a popular Liverpoolian band would be commemorated in every shady Indian bar with a dish, Beetle 65. Well played. Well played indeed. I mean, yeah, I mean, this is like more edible buck flavors, which are sago grubs, are eaten across Southeast Asia, tastes like bacon.
And the Youngly article that referenced them gave this helpful tip. Hear me out here. If you fancy trying them raw, they recommend removing the head as they have sharp little pincers that are not afraid to give you a nip. Wow.
Crack is a great phrase, just having people unafraid of doing things casually. People need an extra casket when they die to weigh their balls separately. Yeah, I mean, this may be too fast for some people, but if you fancy trying scorpions in China, don't worry, cooking them destroys their venom. They have a slightly fishy taste.
Apparently tarantulas, which you can find cooked up in Cambodia and Venezuela, sometimes taste like crab or shrimp. But some others have reported they taste like chicken. And a disgusting looking water bug is said to taste like salted banana or melon. Whoa, let's take it a little slow then, shall we?
Maybe a tiny cricket or fruit fly or something before we become fellows and little eat anything that moves. Yeah, before we settle into our bug-munching utopia, should we just take a little break, Chuck? Yes, I think we should. Yeah, I mean, all the way I'm trying to throw up.
I'm throwing a break. Wow. Thank you. And I invite you for the conversation about your personal path for each Monday on the IBM Podcast app or the website or on any podcast streaming platforms.
See you, folks. And we're back. And we were pretty much deep into our burrowing deep into our insect utopia, which is, and here we were finally talking about all the great things that insects can do for you and as they can be as great diet. But there are a few drawbacks to what we can call insect husbandry.
And we are not going to make the obvious joke with husbandry, so let's move on. And so, yeah, I mean, considering that we are eating insects after all, they need to be cleaned and stored properly. Otherwise, they can be host to bacteria, which can cause serious food poisoning. Also sounds like an Astex character.
Forget wanting to throw up when you eat bugs. You may have a serious trouble keeping them from exploding violently from the other orifice. Yeah. And toxicity is another problem.
Large-scale pesticides make some bugs absorb the toxins within their bodies, which can cause serious health problems for those eating them. I suppose this is way more serious than it appears. In fact, it's actually part of the larger thing that, I mean, for insect husbandry to really take off, we will have to drastically cut back on the regular kind of farming that we do, which is pesticide-oriented. Either that or, because I've seen a TV program, I think, one of those BBC documents, a fantastic fascinating thing, which talks about how insects are a very, very important source of protein in many poor South Asian countries.
And they basically harvest the insects while, and as pesticides become endemic, these guys are the guys who are going to pay for it. Exactly. So that's a sobering thought. However, people always have to do some sort of keelah.
How do these things? Yeah, I mean, some insects may be edible regardless of their toxicity. In the Karnia region of Italy, some moths are eaten by children despite their potential toxicity. The moths are known to produce hydrogen cyanide precursors in both larvae and adults.
However, the adult moths contain cyanogenic chemicals in extremely low quantities along with high concentrations of sugar, making the moth a convenient supplementary source of sugar during the early summer. The moths are very common and easy to catch by hand, and the low cyanogenic content makes the moth a minimally risky seasonal delicacy. Wow. So these are like a delicacy I'm guessing among children.
And my mom wouldn't even have to eat roadside vadava because I've been done this. All this is fine, but why do we have to eat bugs? I mean, we have loads of pretty decent regular fruits. Spoken like a coastal elite.
I mean, yeah, it is true. We do have a lot of regular food, but it's... It's really unsustainable. Yeah, in the 21st century, we have a serious food security problem.
I mean, the majority of the planet, like 30% of the planet is covered by farmland, and with this amount of food that it produces is very minuscule compared to the burgeoning population of the world. So with this massive food security problem, bugs produce or insects produce like a very, very strong source of nutrition, which is sustainable. They're green, they're nutritious, they could help people out of poverty. And well, for people who are willing to do the farming of these insects, you could bag yourself like a $4.32 million bounty, because the European Commission is offering a very generous price to the group that develops the best idea for making insects a popular food.
So I mean, if you're able to, like you said, wasabi flies or chocolate covered caterpillars, I guess, if you could do something like that, you would pretty much be pocketing a decent $4 million. I went to Chhattisgarh a long time ago, and they make this pretty awesome ant chutney. At least that's what it's called. I didn't know it was ant chutney.
It's very sour, if I remember right. And they told me it's entirely made out of red ants. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's part of Dihar as well.
I've heard of this, actually. It's one of those weird foods in India that Listicles made this little. I went to Thailand, and they were selling these grasshoppers, and I chickened out, man. I was all...
You chickened out, literally. I chickened out, and I'm so ashamed to say this. I went to Thailand, and I was so sort of revolted by all this. There's another place where they were selling some pig head curry.
You know, like, generally one little pig. Like, you know, either you can imagine Kamala Anderson in the pool and poking her head out. It's like, Kamala Anderson the pig, and it's like poking her head out. Which is what I mean, a lot of guys were like, I mean, if you take people who are into food engineering and stuff like that, they are all for this technology.
But the biggest problem, and it's the most obvious problem also to everyone, is that basically people find insects gross. So that is the biggest problem for adoption, unless people are taking it up. And one of the simpler solutions for all of this is actually one thing called, which is basically grinding these things up into unrecognizable forms, and giving it. So one of the most popular forms of insects getting into the regular food supply is creating flour out of crickets.
So crickets are protein, and flour is basically that. So grinding up a bunch of crickets and producing flour is actually very common in a lot of countries now, and they're actually producing that as a form of flour, which is highly protein-atious and very easy to make. But it'll be very, very difficult to sell to people who are... And the other thing is this, okay?
Maybe there is something in evolution that makes sense why we find insects revolting. Because we don't like, human beings don't like bitter things, because bitter things are usually poisonous. So over a period of time, we've grown to dislike that taste. So it makes us throw up.
And that's body's defense for poison. So perhaps there's something about insects. Maybe as humans evolved, they must have found that most creepy-crawly things usually hurt you, so stay far away from them. And there's some such evolutionary explanation.
But then there's also the problem with the other side of the argument being that we have ventured so far away from being from our natural states. The number of people that are filling up the world, and the number of... I mean, the way we are consuming food, at the rate at which we are consuming food. I think there needs to be some unnatural form of food coming in, which might be bugs.
And I mean, that is natural as well. I mean, it's as natural as it gets, but maybe required for our source of protein. So, chap, despite my better judgment, would you like to end this with a pun run? Why not?
Here we go. Yeah, sorry about that. Okay, which insect does both marijuana and alcohol? Grasshopper.
Next, if Aamir Khan were to make a movie on a 60s British band, what would it be called? Dungle Beetle. If you score the internet for... What type of pornographic website would you go to for looking up prostitutes specifically?
Ponder? No, it's Hornet. I'm not proud of that one. Which is the loudest insect in India, you know?
Bionic Moth. And finally, you know which song Bionic Moth likes to sing? We will, we will rock you. We will, bowl we will.
Oh, we will. Oh my God. You look bright. You look like a...
Who has the answer to the question So I'm sure you're dying to say something Yeah, so What do you call An insect Which sits silently And bores everyone for 5 days And then punishes Test kicker We have for the first time Seen interest coming from The other side of the table Our usually quiet and reserved Producer Naveen Who usually has his head In a puke bag You have a question for us Yes, guys What do you call an insect That touches Larve inappropriately Go on I'm trying to picture An insect that touches Larve inappropriately Is a centipede And an insect That gets unnecessarily emotional Is also called a centipede So on that note On that grubby note On that mat Lots of protein So it turns out Insects do produce a fair amount Of gas alcohol Thanks guys for sticking around You can subscribe to Simplified On iTunes On Pocket Cast And all the other apps On Android As well as Audioboom And check us out on Facebook And you can ping us on At Shriketh At Chennai And at Chakandahogopal In no particular order And so if you want to hear us Do more episodes on the fly And continue to bug you A lot more Please come back And listen to future episodes Of Simplified And that's what happened Bye Thank you