A few years ago, if you wanted to buy your sweetie some good chocolate covered scorpions for Valentines Day, you had to literally hunt them down. Fortunately, you can now order all of your favorite candied arthropods from the Internet. Caterpillars trapped in lollipops, grasshoppers baked with salt and vinegar and silkworm pupae doused in chocolate are all only a mouse click away. Even Walmart’s website advertises chocolate dipped insects as a protein snack.
To be fair, bugs do have nutritional value, which is why people across the world have been eating them for thousands of years. About two billion people alive today regularly eat insects for their high fat content, fiber and, of course, their taste. In fact, the Food and Agricultural Organization of the UN released a document in 2013 advocating the harvesting of bugs for food to deal with the world’s impending food crisis as our population increases. A combination of recent scientific attention to bugs and TV shows like “Bizarre Foods with Andrew Zimmerman” are slowly turning something once taboo into a treat.
Eating bugs isn’t a completely new trend in the U.S. The Bug Appetit Kitchen, housed in New Orleans’s Audubon Butterfly Garden and Insectarium, is famous for its chocolate fountain for dipping crickets, wax worms and any other bug you can shove a stick through. Crickets also come in baked into cookies and fudge alongside marshmallows.
Americans distressed by the thought of eating bugs should consider that the FDA already allows chocolate producers up to 60 microscopic dead insect pieces per every 100 grams of chocolate they sell, so tell your weary lover that just a little bit more bug can’t possibly hurt them.
