Over at the HuffPo, they've got a great new idea to help us sustain mother Earth -- eat bugs. From Kerry Trueman,

We Americans have a bias against eating bugs -- well, most of us do, anyway. Just try serving your family a batch of homemade granola laced with pantry moth larvae -- I did, and it totally grossed them out. Once these miniscule maggots gatecrashed my granola, I tried to make the best of it and defended my locally grown larvae as a good source of protein along with the almonds, pecans, and walnuts. My niece didn't swallow it (too busy gagging, I guess.)

...Is it time to start chowing down on some of those crawly critters we instinctively prefer to stomp on? The Feral Forager, a self-published 'zine excerpted in Sandor Katz's The Revolution Will Not Be Microwaved, rebrands pill bugs as "land shrimp"; grasshoppers are "surprisingly tasty and filling" and taste "something like popcorn"; crickets, "incredibly high in calcium and potassium." Roasted grubs make a fat-filled protein snack that, again, tastes "a lot like popcorn."

Earthworms make "a very nutritious flour," and ant eggs are edible, too; raw ant eggs reportedly taste "like couscous", but the author of the article confesses that "the only time I tried this it tasted like a hundred ants biting my tongue..."

But the Feral Foragers don't draw the line at eating insects; some of them go so far as to cross the (yellow) line in their pursuit of alternative food sources. As members of a North Carolina collective called Wildroots, they're what Katz calls "Roadkill Radicals" -- enthusiastic advocates of peeling "dishonored victims of the petroleum age" off the pavement and converting them into "food which nourishes."

As the Feral Forger notes, "picking up roadkill is a good way to get fresh, wild, totally free-range and organic meat for absolutely free." Finally, a silver lining to our car-crazed culture.

...If the thought of eating bugs and roadkill freaks you out, consider this: competition for the world's dwindling resources is heating up right along with the planet, and global warming is worsening food shortages all over the world. In this land o' plenty o' processed foods, most Americans can't imagine an era when we'd be forced to subsist on weeds, bugs, and -- till we run out of gas -- roadkill.

As a country boy, I've eaten more than a few out of the ordinary foods in my life: gator, snake, rabbit, turtle, deer, bear -- so, I'm not horrified by the idea of trying unusual foods.

But, roadkill, moth larvae, and earthworms? That's just gross. I mean, if someone says that they want to eat weeds and ant eggs, well, more power to them, but there's a reason most people prefer steaks and chicken.

Moreover, I seriously doubt people in America will ever "be forced to subsist on weeds, bugs, and -- till we run out of gas -- roadkill," unless some sort of cataclysmic disaster happens. You know, asteroid strike, nuclear war, global plague, zombies eating everybody -- something like that. But, even if there ever are Malthusian "worsening food shortages" in the world, you can be pretty sure, given how good our farmers are, that we'll be about the last people left on earth to run out of food and quite frankly, the tiny amount of global warming we've had or are going to have isn't going to change that.