Hornet highballs anyone?

After school last Wednesday, I watched my five-year-old daughter pop a dead cricket on to her tongue and proclaim it: ‘Like fishy popcorn!’ ‘MMMm, delicious!’ squealed her friend, reaching for more as a third little girl spat hers, discreetly, back into her palm. ‘I’m getting pistachio,’ said the spitter’s mum, picking up the packet for closer scrutiny. I popped one into my own mouth and got stale, mealy, chewy: like a morsel of dusty, old crab-paste sandwich.

I bought the edible Acheta domesticus at my local farm shop. They were stacked, like a drinking bet, above the local gins under a sign reading: ‘Sharing for the Daring.’ Mealworms with Sesame and Cumin; Grasshoppers with Paprika and Crickets with Sweet Mango. Pretty pricey at £6.50 for 14g. Suburban Essex’s answer to TV’s Bush-tucker Trials and tabloid splashes about Angelina Jolie frying scorpions with her kids.

More seriously, entomophagy (eating insects) is often pitched to us as the sustainable protein source of the future. If the human population reaches the estimated nine billion by 2050, our current environment trashing rates and methods of meat production won’t keep up. Compared to beef and pork, insects are also a healthy choice: low in fat and high in calcium.

But the myth of bugs as ‘the new food Messiah’ is briskly scotched in the opening pages of Phaidon’s beautiful new book On Eating Insects. Mark Bomford, Director of the Yale Sustainable Food Project, says the problems we face as ‘a moderately successful social animal with a poor feed-conversion ratio’ are far too complex to be solved so easily. Although entomophagy would cause far less environmental damage than cattle farming, he thinks we can do better. He goes on to make the surprising claim that we’d be more humane, take far fewer lives and cause much less environmental damage if we could find a sensible way to eat large whales.