Stir-fried crickets, anyone? How about some chocolate-covered scorpions for dessert?
While many westerners might find such buggy cuisine revolting, two billion diners would disagree.
That’s how many folks worldwide are already eating edible insects, a valuable source of protein and nutrients that Ian Toews says North Americans could come to rely on some day.
“It’s just a matter of getting used to it,” says the Gemini Award-winning local director and cinematographer before boarding his flight to the Netherlands to start shooting Bugs on the Menu, a documentary about using insects as a food source from Victoria-based 291 Film Company.
Developed by Toews and Victoria producer Mark Bradley, the film was inspired in part by the United Nations paper Edible Insects: Future Prospects for Food and Feed Security.
“If you look in the ocean at the lobster and shrimp we eat, they’re bottom-feeders,” Toews said. “Shrimp is this amorphous blob, a fish version of an insect that we eat. It’s a matter of conditioning.”
Toews, 42, is no stranger to the bug buffet himself, having tasted dishes such as crickets pan-fried with chicken and lime (“very crunchy”) near San Jose, and a meal of Indonesian insects.
“It was an Indonesian preparation of ants on shoestring potatoes,” the globe-trotting filmmaker recalled. “They almost looked like pepper.”
Toews is spending six days in Holland, where he will shoot at three locations. They include Wageningen University, where he will interview Prof. Arnold van Huis, one of the scientists who authored the groundbreaking UN study. Toews is being joined by Andrew Naysmith, the Victoria filmmaker whose documentary Tide Lines, about two local brothers and a friend who documented the effects of plastics pollution while circumnavigating the globe in their 12-metre sailboat, premiered last month at the Victoria Film Festival.
The pair will then travel to South Africa, Zimbabwe and Botswana to film people who harvest caterpillars, grasshoppers and makeke (soldier termites) for food. They will also visit restaurants in San Jose and Santa Monica that are breaking new culinary ground with insect-based cuisine that activists hope to bring to western cultures, and Hot Lix, an edible insects candy store in Pismo Beach, Calif.
Bugs on the Menu will also follow a startup company that aims to bring protein-packed “cricket flour” to North American shelves for mass consumption, and they’ll observe the Maku people in the Amazon basin, who have eaten palm weevil and Atta soldier ants for generations.
“It’s a serious documentary,” says Toews, noting his film will expand on how 100 pounds of feed produces 10 pounds of beef, while the same amount of feed produces four times that amount in crickets. It will also illustrate how it’s estimated we’ll eventually need to double conventional agricultural production to help feed an expanding world population, expected to reach nine billion by 2050.
“We don’t want to poke too much fun or make it about grossout jokes. It’s about helping to ameliorate some of the hunger in the world through alternate forms of protein.”
Armed with gear including the company’s new Arri Alexa camera, the state-of-the-art camera used to shoot Hollywood features such as Hugo, Life of Pi and Gravity, the filmmakers will also capture footage at open-air markets in central Africa.
“They sell termites and locusts and caterpillars just like we’ll go to our markets here to buy strawberries or blueberries,” says Toews, who first met Naysmith, a frequent visitor to Africa, when he was shooting Prudence Emery’s short film Hattie’s Heist, with Naysmith as his second camera operator.
Naysmith, who has established useful contacts in African communities and is familiar with local customs, says he’s particularly excited about filming mopane worms near Venda, South Africa.
“It’s a critter locals have eaten for thousands of years,” he said. “We’ll be catching up with them on the second of two breeding seasons.”
Meanwhile, Bradley will be holding the fort at 291 Film Company’s local headquarters, and reminiscing about the time he tasted crickets.
“They were toasted with flavouring. They tasted like chips or popcorn,” says Bradley, 37, who doesn’t mind missing the journey. “I don’t have to deal with 15-hour flights, either.”
While Naysmith has tried insects before, including deep-fried grasshoppers in Morocco, he admits he has had to prepare himself to “man up” to bite into some more bugs to be courteous.
“I think they should film me, because there might be a good physical reaction.”