Pest de Resistance – Creepy-Crawly Festival To Promote Eating Insects

A festival taking place in the UK in April is aiming to promote insects as part of our staple diets. Pestival 2013, who are aiming to have the event held in London next month, are trying to change people’s attitude in the West towards insects as food.

The festival, a Wellcome Trust-baked insect appreciation event which will be held in April, will give centre stage to the possibility of bug consumption. The idea is that instead of crushing the pests, we can now consider eating them for their nutritional value.

Pestival will also feature a two-day pop-up restaurant run by Nordic Food Lab, the team behind the award winning Danish restaurant Noma, which is famous for feeding diners meals with ants, grasshoppers and moth larvae.

According to The Guardian, The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation has been funding projects since 2011 aimed at promoting eating and farming of insects. In other parts of the world, insect-eating is not taboo like it is here, in South-East Asia and Africa, an apparent two billion people consume insects and caterpillar larvae as a regular part of their diet.

Rene Redzepi, chef for the Noma restaurant commented: “I know it's taboo to eat bugs in the western world, but why not? You go to south-east Asia and this is a common thing. You read about it from all over the world, that people are eating bugs. If you like mushrooms, you've eaten so many worms you cannot imagine. But also we eat honey, and honey is the vomit of a bee. Think of that next time you pour it into your tea.”

The benefits of eating insects are obvious and immense, those in the developing world would certainly have a food source and considering the price of food, particularly meat, insects as part of the staple diet is perhaps an inevitable move forward.

Fancy a run round the back garden to look for dinner?