{"id":8551,"date":"2015-09-29T21:51:42","date_gmt":"2015-09-29T11:51:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/?p=8551"},"modified":"2015-09-30T05:36:19","modified_gmt":"2015-09-29T19:36:19","slug":"a-fruitful-day-in-copenhagen","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/2015\/09\/a-fruitful-day-in-copenhagen\/","title":{"rendered":"A fruitful day in Copenhagen"},"content":{"rendered":"

No one likes the term ‘entomophogy’, and perhaps even fewer people know what it means. The title of the journal ‘Insects as food & feed’<\/a> is a deliberate move away from it, but even the term ‘edible insect’ is not unproblematic. According to\u00a0GREEiNSECT<\/a> researcher Afton Halloran, in many cultures the question ‘Do you eat insects?’ can get a negative response, whereas asking about a particularly species\u00a0more often yields\u00a0‘yes’. Some Kaytetye speakers prefer\u00a0the word ‘witchetty’ to ‘grub’; coining terms such as ‘whitewood witchetty’ and ‘river red gum witchetty’ as\u00a0translations of the various edible larvae, a\u00a0semantic extension also found in Kaytetye.<\/p>\n

The pejorative overtones of English \u2018grub\u2019 and \u2018insect\u2019 reflects a preference in English to use a culinary name for animals as food. Consider ‘meat\/animal’, ‘venison\/deer’ etc. When the\u00a0Kangaroo Industry sought a culinary term for skippy, they may\u00a0have done better had they adopted\u00a0marlu<\/em><\/strong> (Warlpiri) instead of the neologism\u00a0\u2018australus\u2019. For ‘edible insects’\u00a0a similarly palatable set of sounds for English speakers might be tjapa<\/em><\/strong> (Western Arrarnta).<\/p>\n

Another problematic term is ‘traditional food’. In Europe this refers\u00a0to a food historically produced in a specific region.\u00a0In contrast ‘novel food’ refers to food not generally consumed by humans in the EU prior to 1997; and so many foods that\u00a0have been eaten for thousands of years elsewhere, now entering Europe are\u00a0‘novel foods’.<\/p>\n

\"Bee<\/a>
Bee larvae tostada<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Whilst all this debating of terminology was going on, Roberto Flore, who leads\u00a0the gastronomic research of an edible insect project, had been slaving over a hot stove cooking local bee larvae tostada. We were the lucky guinea pigs for this new dish. We also tried two types of Danish ants<\/a>.\u00a0GREEiNSECT<\/a>\u00a0researcher Nanna Roos recalled how people used to put an open sandwich at the entrance to the nest and come back to find the ants spread out on top ready to eat.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Freeze-dried red ants (Formica rufa)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

For those with money to burn, a gin from made the red ant for can be purchased from the Cambridge distillery<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"Anty<\/a>
Anty gin: a novel food?<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Finally we tried the cheese Fiore Sardo di Gavoi<\/em> from Roberto’s village in Sardinia, whose flavour comes from a fly (Piophila casei<\/em>) that lays larvae in the cheese, making it deliciously creamy and pungent.<\/p>\n

\"Fiore<\/a>
Fiore Sardo di Gavoi\u2014a traditional food of Sardinia<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

All in all it was an \u2018insectful\u2019 rather than \u2018fruitful\u2019 day in Copenhagen; and Australian\u00a0entomologist Alan Yen was\u00a0sorely\u00a0missed by all. I hope to see the edible insect team down under to share some Australian tjapa<\/strong><\/em>.<\/p>\n

\"Some<\/a>
Tjapa (Endoxyla leucomochla)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

No one likes the term ‘entomophogy’, and perhaps even fewer people know what it means. The title of the journal ‘Insects as food & feed’ is a deliberate move away from it, but even the term ‘edible insect’ is not unproblematic. According to\u00a0GREEiNSECT researcher Afton Halloran, in many cultures the question ‘Do you eat insects?’ … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":29,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[78,10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8551","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ethnobiology","category-indigenous-australia-news"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8551","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/29"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8551"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8551\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8568,"href":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8551\/revisions\/8568"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8551"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8551"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8551"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}