Scanning For Ze Bugs
Watch out for cricket flour and chitinous exoskeletons, there's an app for that too...
Thailand is an interesting locale for the ze eating of ze bugs, because Thais have long eaten all sorts of little and not so little critters. Take a walk through any local pop-up food market in Bangkok, and invariably you shall come across a vendor selling fried crickets, locusts, spiders, and scorpions. On the backpacker-haven-party-street-Khao San Road, such vendors are in abundance along with insect snacks. It almost serves as a rite of passage for young, intoxicated European travelers, in daring one another to inhale a scorpion off a stick for a photo-op to much whooping and clapping. Your correspondent has never felt the urge to partake in this ritual - as the Brits say - “it’s just not my cup of tea”. Each to their own.
When I ran a quick search for “Khao San Road Bugs” I got a hit from a 2016 article, which was already pushing the why eating bugs is good for you mantra, that has become so prolific lately across all the western media outlets - thanks to the Trusted News Initiative and the Rapid Response Mechanism.
Here is a snippet from the aforementioned article via WhatsonSukhumvit.Com:
Why you should eat insects
Arnold van Huis, a tropical entomologist at Wageningen University in the Netherlands, gave a Tedx Talk on 3 September 2012, attempting to convince the audience that they should be eating bugs. Why you ask?
Insects have a similar amount of protein in them to traditional sources, such as eggs or beef.
Harvesting insects requires significantly less food than rearing livestock.
Rearing livestock emits a high amount of greenhouse gases (50 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions, to be exact).
And, last but not least, there are about 1.4 billion insects per person, so there will seemingly be no shortages of sources of protein anytime soon. This is not the case for traditional sources of protein, however.
There is a perfect storm of different elements that are leading many to believe the world is simply going to run out of food.
According to a 2010 Time article titled, “Impending Crisis: Earth to Run Out of Food by 2050?”, scientists are warning politicians and world leaders that a famine is coming.
With the global population steadily growing, climate change occurring and water sources depleting, scientists just might be right about this. It’s becoming harder to keep the animals we so love to eat alive in the first place.
[…]
According to a 2014 US News & World Report Travel article, Thailand is one of only nine countries that are listed to have jumped on the bug bandwagon. Other countries include Mexico, China and Ghana, where insects are actually referred to as a “means of survival,” especially during the spring months when Ghanaians are planting crops.
Hell yeah! Thailand is firmly on the bandwagon. Rejoice!
A friend of mine once regaled me with two stories involving ex-girlfriends and his adventures in their hometowns (rural provinces way outside of Bangkok). The first one involved his girlfriend eagerly buying a snack wrapped up in a banana leaf at the side of the road during a long bus journey, in response to my friend saying he was hungry. As the banana leaf was unwrapped, the big reveal was Koi Khai Mot Dang ( Spicy Raw Ant Eggs Salad) - the little ants were running around as his girlfriend tucked in, but he wasn’t quite as enthusiastic to have a nibble. 👇
The dish is considered quite the delicacy in Northeastern Thailand.
The second story my friend told me involved his girlfriend waking him up at 1am in the middle of a violent thunderstorm along with the whole family. They handed him a jacket which had multiple pockets, then they proceeded to disembark from the house on motorcycles and traveled to a nearby pond. The girlfriend’s brother retrieved a car battery and two large wooden sticks from a backpack, then lowered the battery into the water, electrifying it, ensued by hundreds of frogs floating to the surface belly-up; either stunned or dead. The family began stuffing the frogs into their bags and into my friend’s custom made frog-pocket-jacket in a frenzy.
As they rode their motorcycles back home, amidst the sky cracking open with thunderous applause and violent lightning strikes all around, they all slammed on the brakes and ground to a halt. The Father pointed to a dead roadkill frog in the middle of the road and shouted “collect it!” to my friend. He replied, confused, and shocked, “but it’s roadkill”, to which the Father’s face contorted angrily as he aggressively re-pointed, screeching “collect it, now!” - so my friend reluctantly scooped up the roadkill frog and off they went on their merry way.
Once they reached the house, the family set to work boiling, grilling, frying, and cooking frogs every which way known to mankind. The Father was scooping out the boiled innards of the frogs and wolfing down the ‘snacks’ with a ravenous appetite. After multiple frogs had been ingested by all, the Father offered more boiled frogs up to my friend, who politely declined and said “I think I’m full now, I’ve eaten a lot of frogs”. The Father was offended somewhat, shrugged his shoulders, and carried on getting stuck in until all the amphibious little fellas had gone down the hatch!
SCANNING FOR BUGS
That same friend recently told me another story of a funny interaction in his office, whereby a Thai colleague offered him a “suspicious looking snack”, which led my friend to pull out his phone and scan the barcode of the snack. The Thai colleague ‘caught him’ and asked what he was doing. My friend laughed and explained that he was scanning the product for any traces of bugs, but that it was ‘clean’ - serving as a great conversation starter on the insipid mission creep of cricket flour finding its way into our food supply by stealth.
Here is the app in case you are interested to try it out for ‘hits’ at your local supermarket:
The Insect Scanner App is an essential tool for anyone who wants to ensure that their food is free from insects. With the help of the scanner, you can quickly and easily check whether a food item may contain insects without having to open it or conduct extensive research.
The app utilizes a comprehensive database of millions of food items worldwide to provide you with accurate information.
Ergo, even if the manufacturers omit the words ‘cricket flour’ or other insectoid-exoskeleton-ish vocabulary from the ingredient list, they are still obliged to link the full laundry list of ingredients to a global database via the barcode.
My friend and I chuckled when we surmised that the most likely places we might get positive ‘hits’ with the app would be in the fancy high-end supermarkets in Thailand that import western products - namely Villa Market and Tops Supermarket. So there’s your homework assignment for all Creed Speech readers, have a bash on the app and report back on any hits!
REALTIME DOUBLETHINK
In closing, let us turn to the ever-prescient Off-Guardian.Org’s Kit Knightly for a lesson in doublethink from our beloved fake-stream-media:
I want to close by pointing out the truly hilarious modern irony of the story.
The same outlets that are happily promoting the fact the elites want us to eat bugs and goo:
Are simultaneously calling it a crazy “conspiracy theory”:
We are quite literally in the age of doublethink.
But never mind, we’ll be OK as long as we keep refusing to eat ze bugs…or ze goo.
F*** that bug agenda. I think I’ll go and cook up some bacon and eggs, followed by a juicy steak for lunch. And no, it won’t be that lab-grown shite either, not on my watch.🧐
Happy scanning, you infidels.
Nicholas Creed is a Bangkok based writer. Any support is greatly appreciated. If you are in a position to donate a virtual coffee or crypto, it would mean the world of difference. Paid subscribers can comment on articles, videos, and podcasts, and also receive a monthly subscriber newsletter. Email: nicholas.creed@protonmail.com to enquire about a crypto-paid discounted annual subscription.
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I have eaten the bugs in Thailand. I tried scorpion once it was terribly bitter. Most were drunken one time forays with a few exceptions: I like the ant larvae salad, which my mother in law gathered in season (I had a problem with eating the live ants) and she also collected mang noom in May or so every year, which is a type of large beetle. She used to say that ze bugs were her bestsellers with farang, but since the backlash over the eating ze bugs thing, you can't find anyone that sells them in Phuket anymore. I suppose I always differentiated among traditional foods and those that involve massive corporate investment..
There's no way I can do any better than Paul Driessen on this topic, so here he is:
"Of course, natural forces can’t drive climate hysteria and WEF-Gore-Biden anti-fossil-fuel agendas. Fear-mongering political, activist, media and academic elites therefore ignore them. In the Real World, the wondrous reality is that, after centuries of excruciatingly slow progress, agricultural advances over the past 75 years have been nothing short of astonishing. Dr. Norman Borlaug’s Green Revolution employed plant breeding techniques that multiplied yields of vital grain crops, saving hundreds of millions of lives.
"Since 1950, American farmers increased per-acre corn yields by an incredible 500% and other crop yields by smaller but still amazing amounts – while using used less land, water and fuel … and fewer fertilizers and pesticides per ton of produce. Their exports helped slash global hunger and malnutrition even further. Meanwhile, despite supposed impacts from manmade climate change, farmers in Brazil, India and many other countries have also enjoyed record harvests.
The full article is here: https://wattsupwiththat.com/2024/07/20/waging-war-on-modern-agriculture-and-global-nutrition/ The point is that there's no reason to eat bugs unless you're into that--or unless you're into genocide. To the WEF, WHO, UN, and other assorted Nut Zero psychopaths, the saving of hundreds of millions of human lives is a bad thing. To anyone else the fact that science, innovation, creativity, and ambition combine to feed more people on less land with fewer resources is a net positive.