Insects – the new Superfood (1)

Remember that book How to Eat Fried Worms? A kid dares the main character, Billy,
to eat 15 worms in 15 days. Billy does it, and he ends up liking it. Most of you are
probably thinking gross!

But maybe Billy was on to something. Studies are saying that eating insects could be
good for you and the planet. True, a worm isn’t an insect, but the thought of eating
one may make you shiver just as much as the thought of eating a plate of fried
crickets.

So why are insects - the farmed kind, not ones you’d pluck out of the ground - great
to eat?

Insects are a great source of protein and minerals, such as iron, zinc and
magnesium. If you eat two silk moth larvae, you’ll get 10 times more iron than if you
eat 100 grams of beef. Also, 100 grams of insects (crickets, beetles, red ants and
grasshoppers) contains almost the same amount of protein as meat, but with less fat
and fewer calories. Insects can also be good for your immune system. They include
a protein called chitin that encourages healthy bacteria to grow in your stomach.

According to a 2013 study by the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization,
eating insects may help Earth. Farming insects takes up a lot less space than raising
cows or sheep. Fewer animal farms mean less land is used - and forests cleared - to
grow our food. Insect farms also produce less greenhouse gasses than animal
farms.

Insects are being gobbled up by 80% of the world’s population, specifically by people
in Asia, Africa and Latin America. They’re eating over 1900 different types of insects.

Many of us can’t imagine popping a cricket into our mouths as an afterschool snack.
But would you eat a muffin made with cricket flour? You’d never know they contained
crickets because they’ve been ground to a fine powder and mixed with regular flour,
butter, eggs and other ingredients.
For now, cricket flour is more expensive to buy than regular flour. That’s because it
takes so much work to raise the crickets and process them. But all that is changing
as more companies use and share new ways to farm insects. A couple of years ago,
only seven or eight companies farmed crickets. Today, more than 30 exist.
 An extract from a journalist’s blog (2)

My first meal taught me that crickets taste like dirt. I drank a cricket powder protein
shake, which felt a bit like sand sliding down my throat. After drinking two mouthfuls
of sludge, I threw the smoothie in the sink and went to work on an empty stomach,
unsatisfied and hungry.

By lunch, I was starving and decided to tackle the bugs head-on. So I covered a
vegetable stir fry with maggots, as a friend had recommended. “They’re crunchy and
they kind of taste like caramel popcorn,” he’d assured me. I pushed myself into
eating as much as I could, but the tropical fly spawn ruined everything. I'd managed
two bites before I burst into tears.

It suddenly occurred to me that I’d made a horrible mistake.

See, the truth is that I’m afraid of bugs - deathly afraid. When I was seven, I became
convinced that if I didn’t cover my face while I slept an earwig or a red-back spider
would crawl into my ear canal and lay eggs. I slept with a hand over my ear for
years. And while I don’t do that anymore, I’m now a vegan who is happy to kill
spiders. They’re just ugly and hairy. They’re unnatural and I hate them.
And now, I am attempting to derive all my protein needs from insects, for a whole
seven days!

Questions
1 a) What is the purpose of extract 1? (Why was it written?) [1]
b) How does this purpose differ in extract 2? [1]
2. When comparing extracts 1 and 2, are the authors’ attitudes similar or different on
the subject of eating insects? Explain. [2]
3 a) Why does Billy decide to eat worms? [2]
b) Would the same situation convince you to eat worms? [2]
4. Why is ‘How to Eat Fried Worms?’ written in italics? [1]
5. Quote a fact from extract 1 which proves that a large portion of the earth’s
population already eat insects on a regular basis. [2]
6. In a table format, list the advantages and disadvantages of eating insects for your
personal health. [3]
7. The author of extract 2 is a vegan - a person who does not eat or use animal
products. What is amusing about the way she reacts to spiders? [2]
8. ‘I drank a cricket powder protein shake, which felt a bit like sand sliding down my
throat.’ [3]
a) What figure of speech is contained in the quote?
b) What two things are being compared?
c) What do the two things have in common?
9. How could eating insects be good for the planet? [3]
(Answer in your own words wherever possible)
10. Do you think that the journalist will manage to eat only insect protein for a whole
week? [2]
11. In what tense is extract 2 written? [1]