taste – The Concordian

Bug-eating: a whole gastronomical experience

The Montreal Insectarium recently introduced entomophagy

With the climate rapidly changing, water is becoming less and less accessible. As the need to change the way we eat becomes more and more apparent, food industries are shifting, presenting new forms of food.

Chef-consultant Daniel Vézina, commissioned by Espace pour la vie, developed a series of edible insect snacks. Between Nov. 2 – 5 these snacks were served at a kiosk at Le Central.

“Insects have a lot of vitamins, and proteins, it’s very relevant to make people discover them,” said Elena Zumaran Vasquez, operations coordinator for Les Amis de insectarium.

Zumaran Vasquez explained that her organization specifically works for insect consumption, a practice known as entomophagy. It’s owing to this collaboration with David Vézina that she now believes more strongly that people are more willing to eat insects: “People don’t necessarily see them, they are presented in a different form, where they are integrated into the food.”.

Though insect-eating is not part of Canadian culture, it is a common snack in some countries like Thailand and South Africa. In Thailand, for instance, is it typical to eat fried grasshoppers, crickets, and even worms.

The tasting at Le Central offered four sample foods. There were green hard candies, made from ant sugar and balsam fir. The flavour of the ant sugar was not very strong and did not taste any different from the candies we are used to.

For salty snacks, there were seaweed chips creamed with a tomato tapenade, mixed with mealworm and seaweed dulse. Apart from being extremely salty, they were good.

The second salty snack was the one that people most feared eating. It was caramelized lime almonds with whole grasshoppers. This was the only tasting with a whole insect in it; and despite their sour lime taste, they tasted good. Nevertheless, I’m not sure if I would eat them like I would eat a bag of chips.

Zumaran Vasquez noted that the reactions to the tastings were quite diverse.

“There’s a lot of positive feedback and a lot of interest. At first people are reluctant, but most of them end up trying [it].”

The insects were so processed with the other ingredients that it was barely noticeable that one was eating insects, except for the almond snack, where the grasshopper was in its complete form.

Despite the original idea behind the snacks being the high nutritional value of insects, these bites were so mixed in sugar and salt that it begs the question, would people even eat these if they were not processed with so many unhealthy ingredients?

A suitable analogy would be that of vegan food industries sometimes trying hard to imitate a taste, only to end up making an extremely unhealthy product. Is the avenue of making foods universal for singular palates through imitation necessarily good, or should the food industry shift entirely to proposing foods completely different from what we know?

The crowd of people lined around the kiosk all seemed to enjoy the snacks. Some were more reluctant at first, especially with regards to the almond and grasshopper snack, but after tasting them, many people were pleasantly surprised.

It was only fifteen minutes subsequent to the tasting that my palate tasted strongly of insects. The unfamiliar lingering taste of grasshoppers stayed on my tongue longer than I would’ve liked.

It is indisputable that insects offer a great nutritional value and fill you up. Perhaps our Canadian bodies merely need to adapt to changing gastronomies and the possibility of insect consumption.

Photographs by Catherine Reynolds/THE CONCORDIAN

Sometimes it feels as if North American culture revolves around the notion of guilt. Between sex shaming, health food snacks labeled “guilt-free” and Spotify playlists full of early 2000s pop hits under painfully self-aware titles, it’s impossible to escape the idea that we should feel bad for the things we enjoy. Rather than flat-out admitting to liking something deemed unrespectable, it’s more tactful to couch it with the qualifier “guilty pleasure.” Between the popularity of “Grey’s Anatomy,” Carrie Underwood, and John Green novels, it’s obvious that we’re all consuming so-called guilty pleasures, however, the label remains.

In this view, every piece of media we consume reflects directly back on us as people. Now, I’m not here to argue that culture is removed from ideology or immune from criticism, and that we should blindly consume whatever problematic media we want. Because that’s not what people mean when they discuss guilty pleasures — it’s never an issue of media being harmful (unless you take “brain rot” literally), just media that isn’t up to some arbitrary taste level.

Labeling something a guilty pleasure is a sneaky way of distancing yourself from your enjoyment of it. “Oh sure, I enjoy this but I still know better, unlike some other people.” Somewhere between self-flagellation and self-flattery, designating things guilty pleasures pads our own intellectual insecurities.

Under late-stage capitalism, every action we take must have some goal or purpose in mind. Leisure for leisure’s sake has been eaten away by a drive to monetize every hobby and capture every moment for the perfect social media post, which in turn monetizes ourselves. Thus, even what we do in our spare time contributes to the easily packageable and brandable version of “you,” not to be muddied by unsavoury choices.

When you ascribe negative moral value judgements onto culture and media, it opens the door for the counter to be true as well. If listening to Bon Jovi and reading Dan Brown makes you worthy of shame and disdain, it would stand to reason that one could Brian Eno and Dostoevsky themselves into righteousness. Now, written out that may sound crazy, but tell me you’ve never met someone with a bookshelf where their social judgement should be.

It’s time we remove taste from its link to morality. The pursuit of a guilt-free media environment can easily force you down a hole of music you don’t like and books that don’t speak to you. And who does that serve but your inner critic? Posturing about your intelligence will only drive you deeper into the shame and guilt of your choices, rather than fully rejecting the notion of guilt in the first place. And come on, there are so many larger social ills to tackle than whether to listen to King Princess or King Crimson.

Graphic by Taylor Reddam