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permaculture - Food for the body and the mind.

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Chronological Thread  
  • From: Larry London <london@metalab.unc.edu>
  • To: "permaculture" <permaculture@franklin.oit.unc.edu>
  • Subject: Food for the body and the mind.
  • Date: Thu, 1 Jul 1999 21:22:24 -0400 (EDT)

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Fri, 2 Jul 1999 10:07:33 +1000
From: Argall Family <grargall@alphalink.com.au>

Dan Hook wrote"... I saw an entomologist on a PBS special, say as she was
walking through the jungle "all bugs are edible" I wondered about the all
bugs in that there must be a poisonous one somewhere."

This in turn reminded me that we have in the past collected bugs to make a
bug juice to spray on to plants. I think this is a common recommendation in
use of Bt - you can stop buying if you keep collecting the mortally wounded
are recycling their essence. The basic point being that you can return to
the plant a bunch of relevant bug pathogens. I think it is useful to look on
the individual bug as 10% microorganism.

In terms of their dietary value for people, I suspect it's all in the
quality of the butchery and cooking. I used to raise pigeons, but found the
emotional and physical effort in slaughter and butchery outweighed the
cuisine-nutritional benefit. Quail have always seemed to me to be on the
wrong side of the effort-benefit balance point, though I once ate some very
good braised sparrow in Shanghai. I can't imagine filleting a cockroach;
worm burgers have been a commercial failure in Australia, other than perhaps
in tax minimisation schemes..

Traditional Aboriginal Australian diet involved bingeing on seasonal bugs, a
very notable example being the big fat woolly bogong moth, which migrate in
millions into the high country to breed once a year, at a very handy time in
terms of winter fat needs for the locals, who would put on pounds and
pounds, late winter, banqueting on bogong barbecue. But these were part of a
very sophisticated and selective and poison-aware, medicine-aware
traditional diet. I would go with the opinion of a tradition-wise Amerindian
in the jungle, ahead of an entomologist.

cheers

Dennis


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