Cricket Flour

This is your body on sustainables.

It wasn’t until I bought an app called LoseIt! that I learned that my habit with lemonade wasn’t at all healthy. In fact, it wasn’t until I began my Martial Education that I thought about my own physical health in any other context than sex and sports. I had no idea what kind of treadmill I was on.

I could blame my mother for keeping me out of the kitchen. I grew up profoundly ignorant of common sense dietary matters because I simply did not cook. I didn’t know how and I didn’t really care how. But she could not be blamed; I was one of five ravenous children she needed to fend off from our limited pantry. She purchased everything economy sized. I especially remember the ten pound can of Planter’s peanut butter we dug into on a daily basis. Plus, you know, I was a boy. I washed dishes, I didn’t fill them, except on weekends and for camping. My mother would sleep in and had nothing to do with breakfast on the weekend. So I came to excel in that particular specialty. I was a wizard with omelettes, sausage and biscuits. I mixed a great trail mix and grew a fondness for campout cooking that I still have to this day. Nothing beats pickled herring on saltines, trail mix and water from a bota bag. To this day I categorize cooking into three slices, mechanical, chemical and alchemical. I’m a mechanical cook. I can denature egg proteins, then again so can a hot manhole cover.

The Calorie Man
About 12 years ago, my new boss, and perhaps my favorite boss of all time introduced me to author Paolo Bacigalupi. If you only read one story from him, I recommend it be The Water Knife. This particular dystopia about the American Southwest was smaller than the one that brought fame to the author. That was the stunning novel The Windup Girl in which he introduced me to the practical aspects of robot classes and caloric budgets.

The first question, what does it feel like to be a sentient robot slave is quite interesting, but the larger environment into which this drama takes place is a world where almost nothing grows. Bacigalupi may very well have come from a quite impoverished background, but whether or not that is the cause for the nature of his apocalyptic visions, the visions themselves are executed with conviction and illustrative power. The second question, what is it like to have food police, is astonishing. Imagine the world of food production worked like the world of oil production in the days of the Oil Shock. Imagine a strictly policed limit on your daily consumption on food which was as easily managed as today’s distribution of gasoline. You get no food from a broad variety of farms, bodegas, supermarkets and warehouses. Nope. There’s only McDonalds and you can only get your daily cheeseburgers with your McCredit card. The burger supply trucks are armed convoys and the distribution centers are guarded like armories in wartime. Only the super wealthy eat when and how much they like.

My paranoid friends told me to watch out and I paid them no mind. For me, the idea of food rationing in the United States was preposterous. Nobody could possibly convince Americans that we could not eat good and plenty with absolute freedom. I set for myself a tripwire which was the size and variety in the supermarket cereal aisle. But I think my impoverished background in nutrition and in cooking led me to the wrong benchmark - not because of the reduced variety of food we see, but because even more strangely, Americans are far more suggestible than I assumed.

The Green Conspiracy
I do not believe in conspiracies, but I do believe that even though nobody is going to corner the market, some elite few have a much better idea which way markets will go and how it will affect large populations. Not to harp on the general idiocy of Neo-Malthusian environmentalists, but nobody can deny that affluent populations of consumers aren’t well-informed. To the extent that they are themselves not chefs or farmers or professionals in the food business, such people are highly vulnerable to their sense of entitlement to convenience. I include myself in that demographic. On the plus side of that entitlement, I do take the arrogant presumptions against any encroachment on my liberty to eat as I choose. On the downside of that entitlement, I rather feel that I have infinite choice. In other words, whatever choice my social inferiors have, I can use their constraints as a benchmark for my own freedom. I can hedge against the greater food fool. I don’t have to outrun the bear.

But COVID has taught me that when the shit hits the fan, and the masses get squeezed, it will be because infrastructure and the people working that infrastructure have gotten squeezed. In other words when global supply chains are constrained, elite demand can go pound sand. All the Karens in the Tri-State area won’t make a damned bit of difference in the actual delivery of goods. Whatever they’ve been saying prior to that moment of realization will be memory-holed and they will preach their next gospel of convenience and moral certitude. Rather like the residents of Martha’s Vineyard are all green except when it comes to wind turbines that might disrupt their ocean views.

As an aside with a sample size of three, I can say with confidence that all rich people hate small bathrooms. The only thing they hate more than small bathrooms is the prospect of being broke. My point is that you’ll never see mandated water constrictors in the baths of the rich and famous. They’ll have someone dig wells first.

This doesn’t change the marketing ‘fact’ that ‘all of us together must save the planet’. No doubt the accountants with the fancy clients have already figured out how to amass carbon credits come tax time. In the meantime, we eat kale.

Step One, Kale
For me it’s not kale that hails the apocalypse. It’s millet. The boiling frog which is my peasant appetite has already made friends with kale. I rather like the way the Spousal Unit prepares those salads, with just the right amount of raisins and that gristle that is whatever part of kale that is. It’s the classic Kurosawa film the Seven Samurai and all such tales of feudal Japan that has impressed me about millet. When you are too poor to afford rice, it’s millet. Kale may be the American millet of romaine lettuce, but I mostly know Caesar salads as a luxury. I wonder, however, if kale is replacing regular old hamburger lettuce, and something I ate at Carl’s Jr. makes me think that time might not be too far off. All I know is that I didn’t do the research which has reoriented the marketplace.

Step Two, Beef
Lots of people here in California have a beef with beef. It’s difficult to tell exactly how impossible Impossible Meat is. It has certainly made a splashy debut at Carl’s Jr, but I also have Fatburger and In-N-Out nearby. I’m confident that they will go down with the ship of beef to the very last. One of the very toughest questions you could ask someone affluent is whether they would give up beef, chicken, pork or fish. For me, I think the answer would be beef, but with chicken as a close second I might be swayed either way. I can’t imagine giving up bacon, pork sausage, or Borkies.

Borkies
In my unfinished near future, social dystopian sci-fi novel, I created a food called Borkies. The invention of Borkies, as the Spousal Unit will attest, owes to the fact of my obsession with Panang curry. Many years ago, shortly after my discovery of the miracle spice I declared that I would eat Panang anything, including my own dog. Thus in my imagination, I envisioned a world in which the government knows what your Panang-like miracle spice is and they teach you how to prepare it in highschool. This guarantees a bit of self-sufficiency but also, they’ve got your number.

In this post-beef, pre-millet world, restaurants would know your particular Panang and would have their universal sauce dispenser working like those new Coke machines that allow you to mix your own soft drinks. So if you order a bowl of Borkies, which is that world’s equivalent of a meat & potatoes meal, they can read your favorite spice from your credit card and they know just what you will always eat. The trick though is that in my future world, we have solved hunger by converting a larger set of meats into the meat of a bowl of Borkies. So today when you might order Panang Duck or a bowl of rice with Panang and chopped pork bellies, the future’s Borkies will use your miracle spice with rice and any number of unthinkably farmed meats, including of course mice, gulls, moles, voles and prairie dogs.

Of course the ultimate unthinkable meats would be those like spiders, roaches, worms, grubs, and grasshoppers. All kinds of semi-thoughtful people have argued in favor of changing the human diet to include insects. They like the statistic that the weight of insect biomass dwarfs that of humans. That may or may not be the case but if you think picking strawberries is backbreaking work, imagine farming insects. I’d rather work in a coal mine. Nevertheless, insects for food is not so far out as you would think. I’ve most definitely had crickets as a sort of sesame seed tasting garnish on some gourmet grub down under in the tony Sydney suburb of Surrey Hills. And yes, I confess I’m the kind of foodie that likes odd food to look like what it does in nature. I much prefer the squiddy legs on my plate than something that looks like onion rings. So I enjoyed the interestingly colored bugs.

But I do not appreciate the marketing of alternative foods done in the same way people sell vitamins and minerals. See for yourself. Crickets are part of a complete breakfast.

Eating crickets has several health benefits. According to Dr. Axe, cricket flour is a good source of B12 and amino acids. Additionally, eating crickets is highly beneficial for the world at large as crickets require significantly fewer resources than cattle and livestock. In fact, with so many plus sides to eating crickets, it's hard not to wonder why cricket flour isn't already a huge part of people's diets in the Western world. Cricket flour has much to offer. And, as long as you keep an open mind, you might find yourself enjoying cricket-laden snacks in no time.

The Untold Truth. Hoo boy.

Conservatism vs the Lindy Effect
Philosophically speaking, I need to check myself. Which part of me is being reasonable and which part of me is reflecting an ideological or reactionary conservatism? If you’re familiar with the work of Nassim Taleb, you are aware of his citation of the Lindy Effect. If not, here is the cheat sheet.

The Lindy Effect, in my own words, explains why ideas and concepts that have lasted 200 years are likely to last longer than the latest trend. The trend of humanity to avoid eating insects and to be afraid of spiders is thousands of years old. I can say this ‘with all due respect’ to the hawkers of cricket flour, only meaning that there is not a whole lot of respect due.

Yet this is another area in which I have my suspicions about the Rulers and their Genius enablers whom together you have heard me refer to as ‘elites’. We’ll get into this new wrinkle on my Peasant Theory coming up before the end of this year. The more I listen to other folks complain about what’s going wrong in America, the more convinced I am that I have a bead on what’s actually happening in the minds of those with influence and power.

As you’ve surmised, my aim today is to tickle your imagination when it comes to liberty and food.