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Organic dates, peanuts, organic raw honey, brown cricket... so reads an ingredient list for
Chapul's Chaco Bars.
Chapul
is just one of a growing number of food businesses selling edible
insects for human consumption. Chapul grinds its cricket protein into
flour, allowing consumers to reap the health benefits of the cricket
meat without the satisfying crunch of biting into an entire grasshopper
taco, as can be found at New York's
Tacombi.
This
is nothing new. Humans have been eating insects since prehistoric
times, continuing through ancient Greek and Roman tradition and
persisting as a traditional food for many cultures in Asia, Africa and
Latin America, according to
National Geographic.
Aren't
crustaceans just giant underwater bugs? Would people be so eager to eat
lobsters if they crawled around suburban backyards?
Think biting into a cricket is far off for you? Check out the FDA's
sanitation and transportation standards,
which states the limits for insect fragments, larvae and even rodent
hair in processed food. One rodent hair in under 100 grams of chocolate?
Totally fine. Four-hundred-seventy-five insect fragments in less than
50 grams of ground pepper? No biggie. When it comes to preprocessed
foods, standards are lax, at best, for what can go into these huge
batches of edible mass.
While many may gag at the thought of
eating a bug, Americans pump their body full of many more unsightly
chemicals and compounds on the regular. Before snubbing a hugely
sustainable (and to many, tasty) source of protein, you should think
twice about your yoga mat sandwich bread. Antifreeze, human hair, coal
tar, rodent hair and feces, silicone, arensic and beaver anal glands are
just some ingredients you'll find in commercially produced food. All of
these ingredients are disguised as unrecognizable chemical names that
sound, well, edible.
Amino acid, for example, sounds like a
perfectly natural ingredient. And it is, for the most part. But this
shelf life prolonger found in most packaged breads is derived from
feathers, animal hair and even human hair, claimed to be swept off
barber shop floors in China, according to
VRG.org.
Mother Jones also points out that
L-cysteine,
another name for the amino acid, can come from animal sources but can
also be created in a lab, and added to items like packs of hamburger
buns for fast food chains to prevent spoilage. Is a chemical allowing
you to eat month-old bread really much better than consuming crickets?
A
scandal about the popular cinnamon whiskey Fireball using antifreeze as
an ingredient broke out in fall 2014, leaving plenty of shot-taking
tailgaters perplexed about what they were actually getting drunk on.
Fireball doesn't use actual antifreeze in its boozy concoction, but
propylene gycol, a component in antifreeze, is used in the American
version of the drink. U.S. law doesn't require that alcohol
manufacturers print ingredients or nutrition info on the label (like
packaged food), but when Norway, Sweden and Finland received shipments
of the whisky containing the chemical, they refused to sell this
formula. The FDA says propylene glycol is “generally recognized as safe”
to consume, so it can't be much worse than crickets, right?
Castoreum,
the dried and macerated castor sac scent glands (and their secretions)
from male or female beavers, is also recognized as generally safe by the
FDA. The ingredient is used as flavoring and fragrance in foods like
ice cream, but why is anyone messing around with beavers' behinds when
they can just make good, totally natural ice cream?
Natural
flavoring, an ingredient found on food labels from ice cream to crackers
to frozen vegetables, is yet another suspicious and potentially
disgusting commonplace ingredient. Everything from crushed beetle shells
to who knows what can be labeled as natural if it follows fairly
arbitrary FDA standards. So yes, crickets may be part of the natural
flavoring of your favorite candy bar and you may never know.
When
it comes to eating, being informed is better than staying in the dark. A
small-batch, chocolate-dipped cricket may not be much worse than a
commercially manufactured chocolate bar.
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