INSECTS IS FOOD.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 16497, 6 August 1921, Page 4

INSECTS IS FOOD.

SOME SUCCULENT DISHES. Necessity is tlie mother o£ invention, and food shortage during the last phases of the war drove ns to make many experiments in search ot substitutes (writes ltowland Brown m John o’ London’s Weekly 0all the difficulties of rationing, towever, no one seems to have considers the possibilities of insect food, thou&n there is abundant authority for their employment iu the caterpillar stage tor human consumption. Birds, slothbears, ant-eaters, and armadilloes are not the only insectivorous creatures. Insects proper, which do not include spiders, have been an article of diet in the East and elsewhere from time immemorial. The ancients accepted them as the piece de resistance, not merely as an agreeable hors d’ceuvre. To this day they arc devoured in many parts of the world; the locust in particular. INSECTS, CLEAN FEEDERS. A number of insects, in rudimentary stages, when the bulk of their feeding is done, are clean feeders, notmerely scavengers: far more bo than many birds, animals, and crustaceans of normal consumption. Compared with the duck, the pig, and the lobster, the caterpillar of a butterfly or moth is exquisitely dainty. Its food is exclusively vegetable, and though there are species which affect strongly flavoured herbs and plants, and are thus unpalatable, the majority exist on leaves, buds and flowers as caterpillars, the perfect insect seldom sharing the taste for carrion and garbage evinced by that most magnificent of our British butterflies, the Purple Emperor. The fat-bodied moths also have found favour with more or less civilised man. The “ Bugong ” of Australia, whose name is derived, not from the common appellative of insects, but from the mountains of New South Wales, whence they issue forth to make boot upon the hives, is eagerly sought after < by the aborigines. The white man ! cannot stomach it; least of all the White Ensign, for it has been known to bonrd H.M. ships in harbour, attracted by the searchlights, in such countless hordes that even guns an d engines have become unworkable owing ,° z 1G ~ T reosv bodies wedging themselves nero there, and everywhere into . a ” d tackle, and the decks converted into skatmg rinks by the trampled dead. FOOD OF JOHN THE BAPTIST. Ihe locust is pre-eminently the insect food, and in _ these days of cures it is surprising that no ingemus doctor lias discovered the grasshopper to be something morei than a ; burden in the land. On the authoritv , that redoubtable fly-fisher. Izaak Walton it was an article of faith \mong the Hebrews that lice swallowed alive were certain antidotes for yellow laundice. In Leviticus, “ the "locust after his kind, and the grasshopper after liis kind ” are exempted from the ‘ ‘lndex Expurgatorius Js of every flving, creeping thing “that goefch on all fours."’ It has been suggested,' therefore, that their use as diet might bo preached farther afield than in those countries only where the locust •is regarded as a delicacy as toothsome as shrimps and prawns. A battle royal has been waged by theologians as to the actual substance of the Baptist's dietary m the wilderness, “locusts and wild honey”; strict vegetarians, forgetting their Moses, jn si sting that the locusts of the Gospels were a sort of bean. The Evangelist probably shared w’ih his countrymen a taste lor the insect whose first cousins, the cicada of Southern Europe, were held bv the poets to ‘jj exist on spirit tire and dew. and inci- l dentally to be the “ roadside nightin- \ gales of the Nvnrohg.” On certain { holidays they are still sold in the Ttal- ( : ian flower markets in little cages, pre- ; sum ably for music, not for meat. ARAB PRAWNS. The Arab, who, like the strict Jew, would not look at shell-fish, has always appreciated the loeu&t. They used to l>e poured into Fez by the cartload : there is a story how, cereals having failed in Arabia. Mecca solved the bread problem by grinding up locusts, j and okeing out the com rations with ! their “ flour.” Usually they are not | eaten raw, like oysters or herrings, and here is a recipe for cooking them: “ Boil first a good while in water, havhig stripned off the legs and wings; then stew them with butter. iy The result is “ a kind of fricassee of no bad flavour.” Locust eggs also have been utilised for soup. In parts of India they are eaten salted, and in Morocco, we are informed, “a person i may eat a. plateful of two or three hundred without feeling any ill effects.” A SPIDER FEAST. Investigation of the problems of heredity in insects has established beyond doubt that in some orders —butterflies, for example—a. palatable species may so closely imitate an unpalatable species as to secure immunity from bird enemies, and survive upon the- earth. Enthusiasts who have tried model and mimic record the flavour without enthusiasm. On the other hand, some scientific men of the first rank, not all of them naturalists, have enjoyed an unctuous feast upon these trifles unconsidered bv their cooks. Dr La Lande. a celebrated French astronomer, found nothing more to his taste than fresh-caught caterpillars and spiders. His biographer modestly declined to partake: but the astronomer decided that while the spider, not a clean feeder, had a nuttv flavour, the caterpillar resembled an apricot or plum. After all, as many men, so many opinions. Most of us •vho patronise frogs and snails in France, both lettuce-feeders, feel no ‘ repugnance to the plat. We swallow t living cheese mites by the countless I million, and them. Another j great French scientist. Reaumur, ad- j vised the caterpillar of the common and f destructive Gamma moth for table s, purposes. The scent g]ands present in J the males of some butterflies suggest | a conserve of lemon or lavender. The t male of the common Ghost moth emits f a delicious odour of pineapple.