Invertebrate Snacks at Selfridges (part 1)
Last Friday (5th December) the London Lite newspaper wrote an article on a new range of snacks being sold at Selfridges, including some quotes from people tasting them:
“If someone gave that to me for Christmas I’d run out of the room.”
“It’s not as bad as it looks, once you get past the thought of it and the funny texture.”
What were they talking about?
A range of invertebrate snacks! You get to choose from*:
Barbeque-flavoured Worm Crisps, £2.75 (Tenebrio molitor!)
Chocolate Covered Giant Ants, £4.95 (Atta laevigata)
Mopani Worms, £11.95 (Imbrasia belina)
Oven-baked Tarantula, £15.99 (Haplopelma sp.)
Scorpion Vodka, £12.95 (Buthus martensii)
Thai Green Curry Crickets, £2.55 (Acheta domestica)
I think I’ll be making a trip with my girlfriend to Selfridges over Christmas to try some. Would you try any?
I think entomophagy is quite an interesting concept/topic because I remember reading (sorry, no citation at the moment) that the energy/protein conversion of insects is fairly good compared to most farmed animals. Are they tasty enough to eat as a regular dietary component? I shall report back…
*I found another site that listed more details about what I think are the same products as I couldn’t find them on the Selfridges website.
Tags: Entomology, Entomophagy, Food, Insects, London Lite, Shopping
Mealworms can be stir-fried as well. You could pick them up fairly easily at a pet store and cook them yourselves.
You only get 15 mealworms from the online site! They are something I’ve been thinking of trying for a while. Have you ever eaten them?
Before I have vegetarian tendencies I would have quite happily tried any of them! Now I’m not quite so sure… I suppose it depends on exactly how all of the snacks were made.
I find it quite funny that on the edible website, the insects are ‘grown specially for Human Consumption’.
I’ve a couple thoughts to share. I suspect that sampling packaged food-insect products is very unlikely to give one anything close to the optimal experience. Nearly all of the canned/frozen insects I’ve had were disappointing. Dried insects tend to be better; some of them benefit by rehydration.
If you are able to get fresh insects, such as Acheta domesticus for example, they would inevitably be far tastier. I’ve tried roughly 40 varieties of terrestrial arthropods, most of them insect. I am a passionate advocate for entomophagy as a solution to various challenges facing our species.
Best regards,
David Gracer
Sunrise Land Shrimp
http://www.slshrimp.com
Dave, your comments make sense and I will probably try keeping my own Acheta domesticus and Tenebrio molitor for human consumption. What other species would you recommend trying?
[...] in December I wrote about a new range of snacks that Selfridges had started to sell, and during a Christmas trip to London I visited Selfridges to [...]
[...] on from two earlier posts (first post, second post) I tried the three invertebrate snacks that I got from Selfridges and, using the [...]