Remember
when William Holden told Ricky Schroder bugs are a great source of protein in The Earthling? What takes them five
seconds requires seventy-four minutes in this documentary. Insects are still
loaded with protein and seems a good many of them taste like roasted garlic in
Andreas Johnsen’s Bugs (trailer here), which screens during this
year’s Tribeca Film Festival.
Chef Ben
Reade and his research associate Josh Evans at the Nordic Food Lab are the cats
to talk to if you are interested in eating bugs. They scour the globe for tasty
creepy-crawlers and larva, bringing the prime cuts back to Denmark. For them,
it is a messianic mission to find and develop low cost sources of high-protein
food-stuffs.
There
are two problems with Bugs: it starts
with a faulty premise and it repeats the flawed line of reasoning over five
beat-for-beat repetitive sequences. Reade and Evans argue bug-based food will
be necessary to prevent wide-spread starvation in the future, but their
neo-retro-Malthusian analysis fails to acknowledge there is no shortage of land
that could be brought into cultivation relatively easily. The hard truth is
most famines that occurred over the last century were not due to crop shortfalls,
per se, but were the result of government policies designed to punitively collectivize
agriculture or to deliberately keep food away from people, for reasons of
social control and/or ethnic cleansing. Bugs are not going to help in those
situations.
Johnsen’s
presentation does not help their case much either. Basically, we watch Reade
and Evan travel to an exotic land, where they listen to a lecture from a local
expert about westerners’ destructive taste for junk food, before heading out
into the wild to rustle up some insectoid grub and grill it up right there in
the field.
