Have you ever heard of the Paleo Diet? The first time I accidentally bumped into it was when I went to the monthly market in a park nearby this month. I saw this brochure of insects for sale that intrigued me into checking out their website that day. According to them a Paleo Diet includes eating meat, vegetables, fruit, fish, nuts and insects.
As I am a Filipina I love eating meals with rice - most of the time but hub and I met half - way so instead of the usual 3 cups of rice a day; I switched to a grain meal in the morning, rice plus a certain viand - huge meal for lunch and kilos of vegetables with fish, white meat or any other seafood in the evening. This is how hub and I eat basically, daily. The Paleo diet doesn't include eating grains, processed food, refined sugar and anything made with milk.
What made me interested in checking that out is the fact that it includes eating insects. It's unusual to bump into food with here in the Netherlands actually.
When I bumped on these guys on that market that day, I really had to stop and ask series of questions to the guy selling it. I even asked whether I could take his pic eating one of these mealworms and crickets.
Yes, these are ready to eat spiced mealworms and crickets.
A bite anyone? :D
He turned the tables on me and said - how about you give it a try and I take a picture of you. There was a guy with his gf or lady friend beside me so I dared him to do it instead. He picked a handful, shoved it in his mouth, chewed and looked just fine, no vomiting happened what so ever so I picked up a piece thinking if I had to spit it out - it's just a piece the guy selling it won't get offended. I chewed with eyes closed which just happened spontaneously. Hmmm... it tasted like prawn flavored popcorn. Crispy on the outside and textured like that of a boiled white egg in the inside. It wasn't disgusting at all. I didn't go for a second time though.
I asked the guy, why they promote eating insects and gave me a brochure to read and check out their site which I did when I got home. There, it says that:
a Paleo diet helps balancing hormones and reduces inflammation.
It improves sleeping patterns, energy and ability to focus.
Plus it could keep any one fit.
Then I saw these chocolate taste testers and having read cacao I just picked up one tiny block and shoved it in my mouth. Just then, I noticed an orange card beside another one of it that says in cricket we trust." He's busily sales pitching so of course, I couldn't ask anymore. It turned out that those chocs in the free taste are made of cricket flour, cacao, dried fruit, nut and some seed. It tasted like old oatmeal and not very sweet. No trace of insect whatsoever I just felt like I was chewing an old and dry brownie.
Curious, I checked out what it says on the brochure about those crickets again and as everyone knows how much I love those little insects, I shut the idea of drying them up and turning them into flour. Those poor guys, I thought. I love the sound of crickets and I don't hear them in Holland except when hub takes me to the Chicken restaurant with a huge field of Heather flowers in Ede which is a drive away from here to take a stroll, enjoy the swallows singing or fly kites together on windy summery days. That's the only time I get to hear those crickets. We sometimes take a stroll there in winter and no trace of those lil' creatures singing at all.
I missed them on my first year here as it's not often they sing so I suppose they are not much in Holland so I wonder whey they got a bunch to turn into this much cricket flour. Not to mention that I imagined how they have gathered and dried that much a bunch of crickets to turn into a cricket flour. When we went to Venice and stayed in the small town 25 minutes drive away in Campalto which I wrote about in this article, I heard them sing the whole day and I love that.
It says that crickets are richer in protein that fresh meat or fish. Intriguing, I thought.
It's even higher in iron content than any other source of iron. At home I checked out their site and it says that it's even better for the environment since crickets produce 80 times less methane than cattle. I got the impression that they've researched it through. The site that distributes these products in Benelux also says that they're rich in potassium, calcium, vitamin B12, amino acids, fiber, omega 3 and 6. Add iodine and it already sounds like a complete diet.
They also come in handy for introducing it to kids. Look at this yummy lollies. But I wonder if any kid would not be taken aback with those mealworms in there and whether it tastes sweet and what sort of sweetener they used in it since they don't use refined sugar. I don't use sugar in my diet unless I eat out which I don't have any control of what's been used to add taste the food I ordered. I usually just use wild honey or flower honey and very little of it.
These crickets even come in different food products and flavors. There's a pistachio - cricket nougat, spiced sweet mango flavored cricket, BBQ and smoked onion flavored cricket. It's not just the cricket they've flavored but also the mealworms. There's spiced - Imperial soy flavored mealworms, Sesame and Cumin spiced mealworms and garlic and spices flavored mealworms.
In Korea, they also eat canned silkworms and one of my students who invited me to dine in their house made me try it out as well. It tasted like boiled egg white with a bit of a chestnutty flavor and a bit salty because it was soaked in soy sauce and something else I can't remember anymore. I didn't just ate one, i ate a whole bowl of that. It was freaking delicious. I highly recommend trying it out if you happen to go visit South Korea. They call it "Beondegi ". It's one of those street foods you could find if you travel to Korea according to them.
I like the fact that they didn't have roaches in there. When I went to Thailand in 2013, I saw dried roaches, locusts, other insects in the market and even scorpions. Yes, it is not the first time insect has been eaten on earth.
The Paleo diet starters studied about its history and the start of eating insects dated back in the cavemen's time. There must be no gut complication in including insect in one's diet. I chose the picture below because just a pic of it makes me squeamish.
Just as I was about to move on to the shop next to it, I overheard a Dutch guy tell his English GF that he's not going to kiss her for the rest of the day as she has stuffed a handful of almost every single thing in the free taste insects in her mouth. I find it funny. Kind'a reminded me of this.
As to whether I would ever consider eating insect in my diet, I'm open to eating mealworms and silkworms as I already know what those taste like and I didn't get any parasite from eating them. I would never sink my teeth in those cockroaches even if they're the last thing to eat on earth. I just find those creepy crawlers freaking disgusting even though they've soaked it in vinegar for some time. No freaking way.
How about you, would you ever consider including insect in your diet? What if there's not much to eat in the place you live in or you have to do some survival in the jungle? Let me know in the comment thread.
I took each picture with a Samsung Galaxy A3 2016 edition.
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I usually blog about cooking, gardening and photography and if you happen to be interested in all of those, too .