¿Comerías insectos? – Ejercicio de reading en inglés

Would you eat insects?

Chef Joseph Yoon is a renowned cook who is popularizing the age-old practice of eating insects. He is used to people reacting negatively to his creations: he’s watched a child cry when she realized the pumpkin cake in her mouth was made with cricket powder, seen a grown adult spit out food that contained bugs and suffered racist online comments aimed at him for suggesting that scorpions are worth eating. But none of that seems to discourage Yoon. If anything, it just reaffirms the importance of his work removing stigma from this practice of eating insects. As the founder of an organization called Brooklyn Bugs and a self-described “insect ambassador”, Yoon is on a mission to prove that eating insects is good for the planet—and the mouth.

Yoon’s work includes giving presentations everywhere from elementary schools to Harvard and working with museums and institutions like NASA on sustainable food initiatives. Occasionally, he cooks for journalists, scientists and environmentalists. His main objective is to raise awareness about the planetary benefits and culinary joys of eating bugs. “I like to share the sense of hope and optimism, and to be able to capture people’s imagination through cooking insects,” Yoon said from his kitchen table in New York over some fried crickets. “The question is: how do we start changing the perception from insects as disgusting animals to something that’s sustainably farmed, nutrient dense and that can add a tremendous amount of flavor to your food?”

Insect consumption has been highlighted by the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization as an important tool in addressing food insecurity for a growing global population. And, since agriculture is the second-largest greenhouse gas emitter after the energy sector, insect eating presents a good climate solution too. Crickets, for example, can provide the same amount of protein as cows for less than 0.1% of the emissions.

Yoon pointed out that people have been eating insects since long before the practice was recognized as a climate win. “There are over 2 billion people in 80% of the world’s nations that are already regularly consuming insects,” he said. But the stigma and disgusting factor that persist in many places, including much of the US, are what Yoon is interested in changing. His approach is to lead with the joy of eating. Learning to enjoy consuming bugs might require some training of your tastes depending on where you grew up, he said, but we apply that training whenever we try new foods from unfamiliar cultures or teach our kids to eat vegetables.

Adapted from Whitney Bauck’s “Meaty, Cheesy, Coconutty: a Chef’s Quest to Prove Insects Taste Delicious.” The Guardian, 9 Sep. 2022.