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For seven days, I only ate grasshoppers, worms, and tarantulas. It was absolutely awful.
By Angela Skujins https://archive.ph/YGqjo

Monday
My first meal taught me that crickets taste like dirt. I drank a cricket powder protein shake, which felt a bit like sand sliding down my throat. After drinking two mouthfuls of sludge, I threw the smoothie in the sink and went to work on an empty stomach, unsatisfied and hungry.

By lunch, I was starving and decided to tackle the bugs head-on. So I inundated a vegetable stir fry with maggots, similar to what Sackle had recommended. “They’re crunchy and they kind of taste like caramel popcorn,” he’d assured me. I pushed myself into eating as much as I could, but the tropical fly spawn ruined everything. I'd managed two bites before I burst into tears, alone in the staff room.
It suddenly occurred to me that I’d made a horrible mistake.

Wednesday
It had been 48 hours, and I was over it. The days were fused together by the ritual of working myself up to eating a buggy breakfast, then barely eating it, and being angry all day. I wasn’t plucky anymore. I was just furious.
I started my day with another protein smoothie. But this time I had two scoops of Greensect, which had spirulina and cinnamon in it. Again, I could only stomach half of it. Inevitably I got angry and wondered about what was stopping me from finishing the food? Why couldn’t I finish a simple goddamn smoothie? I’d been vegan for five years but couldn’t have a simple cricket shake?

Thursday
Noma, a two-Michelin-star restaurant in Copenhagen, Denmark, famously serves lobster mains with live ants. So I tried the next best thing for breakfast: black ants and Vegemite smeared on toast. My housemate Brad had a slice and revered the taste, saying: “This is next level woke!" Watching Brad eat the ants gave me a little confidence in the meal.

I ate the whole meal and felt a tiny surge of pride. The diet was no longer about the quality of the bugs, but about how I could get them into my body. And they were finally in there...

Friday
By this point, I was having a really bad time. Some quotes from my food diary read: “I hate everyone,” and “I don’t want anyone to look at me or ask me why I’m eating these fucking things,” and, the worst of them: “I wish I was dead.” I felt suicidal and stupid, even though I was aware that it was just a simple lack of food. These manic episodes were just a byproduct of inadequate caloric consumption, but knowing that didn’t help.

Traumatized from the night before, I skipped breakfast and rode to work on my bike, and my vision began to fade. The ground slipped beneath me. I wasn’t consuming food and my body had gone into starvation mode: I was hallucinating. I kept seeing Studio Ghibli’s translucent clouds hovering above my bike’s handlebars...

...I flipped [banana bug] pancakes and thought about the past seven days. My conservative Greek grandparents didn’t understand the diet, and neither did my vegan dad. Actually, I wasn’t sure if I’d understood it myself, which I guess is why I hated the pancakes, as per usual.
While scraping them into the bin I remembered what Professor Van Huis said about bugs being disgusting: “It’s an absolute cultural bias,” he said. “But it’s just a matter of educating the public, and it’s important to make insects favorable for the common people.”

I hadn’t done that at all. But now I was sure that insects weren’t the future of food, I was only too happy to eat something antiquated, environmentally dubious, and delicious. Peanut butter on toast. No bugs.

My housemate Brad had a slice and revered the taste, saying: “This is next level woke!" Watching Brad eat the ants gave me a little confidence in the meal.

Why not eat insects? I'll give you a couple of reasons
By Joseph Milton on August 29, 2011

The above question was posed by Vincent M. Holt in 1885 in his book of the same name, and now, having munched on a choice selection myself, I can offer an answer to that question: because they taste pretty awful and have a horrible texture to boot.

The topic was also the subject of a recent TED talk, in which Marcel Dicke proclaimed that insects can hold their own against meat in terms of flavour. Well, perhaps we were eating the wrong insects, but I would have to disagree with Marcel on that one, based on my own recent experience.

I was "lucky" enough to have the opportunity to try these rather undesirable delicacies at London's Natural History Museum on Friday night (that's right, I spend my Friday nights chomping on insects with strangers - what of it?) at an event called "Edible insects - food for the future?".

On the menu were meal worm larvettes (think larvae) and giant mole crickets as a starter, followed by a main of toasted weaver ants, bamboo worms and fried giant crickets, all topped off with a dessert consisting of toasted silkworm pupae and chocolate covered ant wafers.

With the exception of the meal worm larvettes (crunchy and slightly salty - a bit like puffed rice), everything on offer was less than delicious. "Musty" was probably the flavour that came to mind most often, and the bamboo worms and silkworm pupae had a worryingly cheesy or fishy taste.
"Something tells me these are never going to catch on," I though to myself as I picked a giant cricket's leg from between my teeth. The main contribution of the ants in the chocolate ant wafers was to spoil some otherwise perfectly good chocolate with an unpleasant bitter aftertaste. All in all, it was not a culinary experience I will be rushing to replicate.

...The collapse of ecosystems in the mid 2020’s led to the rise of industrialist Niander Wallace, whose mastery of synthetic farming avoided famine.

Science saves humanity. It is always science. Man not God. Like in Interstellar, where the survivors lived off “GMO” corn, basically.



And the survivors of the post apocalyptic world of Blade Runner, with all vegetation wiped out,



have to live off of protein in whatever form they can get. Here the Replicant is a “farmer” “growing” grubs.

...Remember in Snowpiercer the back of the train was fed protein as well in the form of mysterious protein bars that they later discover were made from ground up insects.


But remember also it was just the back of the train, or US, that had to eat those bars. The elite, the front of the train, still got fruits, veggies, and everything else to eat.