These are the fun insect treats responsible parents are buying their children to prepare for their climate change consciousness. Why not? We’ve been eating snails and frogs’ legs for years, and algae and seaweed are positively passé:
Eat Grub (chocolate covered locusts)
Small Giants (honey crunched beetles)
Jiminis (an intriguing take on tamarind grasshopper)
I understand rodents will be excluded, and better not to mention bats.
The new supermarket will be “microbiome”
Your phone will, of course, rule. Breathe into the App, and it will tell you what your body requires you to eat on the day. Scan your device round the kitchen, pass to the local supermarket wall, and voilà! All that data you need to be good to your gut are at your payment card’s mercy.
Here is a prediction for how to prepare a politically correct pizza in 2030:
Base: fake, or plant-based meat
Flour will be mixed with pounded crickets for flavour purposes as we avoid the cruel practice of slaughter of the noble cow and chicken.
Cheese: vegan cheese is already widely available, flavoured by almond milk to spare the rigours of being a hard-put milk provider
Tomatoes: these will be “vertically farmed”, in as much vapour as water can avoided. I am struggling with this one.
Who is leading the international charge?
The Times reported on 8 April that the international hub of serious climate change pioneering is in Latin America, specifically in Bolivia, where a chef in La Paz called Marsia Taha is seeking to use the “vast larder” of the Amazon rainforest to create dishes at her La Paz restaurant, and seeks to play a part in combating the destruction of the one fifth of that rainforest over the last 50 years.
Using delicate larvae that grow within wild palm trees, she prepares flamboyant dishes that enhance natural foods indigenous Amazonians have been eating for centuries and she is breaking taboos.
Next door in Brazil, the double Michelin chef Alex Atala at São Paulo’s DOM restaurant has been offering ants on his menu, served on meringue or with pineapple. A taste he has compared with “something between ginger and lemongrass”.
It appears the glorious Argentinian steak, cut like butter, will fall victim to new sensibilities. No more gauchos swashbuckling over the pampas, alas. They will be sadly missed.
And so to outer space
The final frontier is of course the next step. When we colonise, we need to eat.
But how can we grow food in a grim dark, arid, gravity-free atmosphere? It is more likely your space garden will be bathed in uranium than sun, and it would require a lot of expensive space shuttles to satisfy the needs of the new pioneers.
There will come a time when we begin to mine from asteroids when we run out of terrestrial elements.
The tireless asteroid miners assisting the new pioneers will require rest and recreation following a hard week’s labour asteroid stripping of all that thulium and neptunium and the likes, but where?
A bar, clearly! More than one bar! The Plumbers’ Pub for the first shift of exhausted miners?
Maybe the Spacewalker Skyport for the more discerning travelling miner. And of course, where there are bars, there are restaurants, as Douglas Adams pointed out decades ago.
This is all speculative, of course, but there are real companies with units beavering to tackle it.
It’s all rather exciting, isn’t it?
