Should I really eat insects now?

The EU has expanded the list of permitted insect powders in food, including house crickets and grain mold beetle larvae. Of course that's fine. I can understand some outrage; Grocery moths in the pantry horrify me.

But as far as food goes, I've been shaped since childhood by an experience of Jim Button and Lukas the engine driver. The two come to Mandala in the novel and are hungry. The child's child Ping Pong enthusiastically offers "sugary earthworms in sour cream", "boiled wasp nests", "ant balls on snail slime".

Jim and Lukas squirm and ask for something simple, cheese sandwich. At this, Ping Pong is disgusted, "Cheese? Isn't that moldy milk?” It's just a question of cultural imprinting. Central Europeans eat strange things without complaint, read the list of ingredients. Chemistry is accepted, but flour beetle powder is not? We swear by "living" sourdough and gorgonzola, praise mussels and oysters, grill yes, grill no? The point of view has to change.

The author has tried many things in Asia that have more than four legs.

When the nuclear war panic reached its peak in the 1980s, the post-nuclear world was imagined to be populated only by insects – arthropods were thought to be so adaptable and resilient. As you know, things turned out differently.

Reliable figures as well as a look at the windshield show that insects are dying. Just at the moment when insects are increasingly being pushed out of everyday life, the EU allows the consumption of previously forbidden larvae. Perhaps we can be expected to eat because we see such animals less and less and are disgusted by them. Certainly this will not contribute to the insect die-off.

But you shouldn't do it for ethical reasons. Those who find the idea that animals are food wrong cannot limit their morality to creatures with eyes, fur, and feathers. Just because insects don't feel pain or fear doesn't make them things. Also, any new, clandestine addition to industrial foods is something that should fill every human being with suspicion, whether it's "chemical" or "natural" like insect meal.

The author only eats vermin if it flies into his mouth while cycling