"I started hallucinating and thinking about death": An Australian journalist ate beetles for a week for the sake of an experiment

Australian journalist Angela Scudgins recalled the UN report of 2013, which states that the future of humanity belongs to insects, because there is not enough meat and vegetables for everyone. She decided to test this theory and devoted seven days of her life to eating grasshoppers, worms and tarantulas. To put it in Angela's words, " this is terrible."

When you eat a half-kilogram steak, you also drink 7700 liters of water. That is how much liquid is needed to water the cow's feed, and to give it water during its lifetime. How about a salad and French fries with a steak? Have you already imagined how much precious moisture goes to watering? 

So it turns out that the usual way of eating is completely unecological. Every year the world's population is increasing by 83 million people, and everyone needs something to eat — it's time to switch to insects, there are enough of them for everyone. This is about what was said in the 2013 UN report on the benefits of insect eating, which was downloaded 2.5 million times only in the first day after publication. 

It's been 5 years. The world's ecosystems are still in a sad state, the population continues to grow, and hamburgers with locusts and other delicacies have not entered our daily diet. Wondering if insects are a panacea for humanity, Angela devoted a week of her life to switching to "proper nutrition".

Angela started her journey to the brave new world with the online supermarket "Edible Insects", where she bought grasshoppers with basil (250 rubles), powder from crickets (730 rubles), fried crickets (730 rubles), Mexican grasshoppers (300 rubles), two edible tarantulas (480 rubles each), salt from grasshoppers (820 rubles), dried mopane worms (500 rubles) and a bank of black ants (250 rubles). 

And one of the companies, having learned about the experiment, kindly provided Angela with half a kilo of fried fly larvae. The store's employees recommended adding them to the salad for crunching or putting them on top of cooked pasta.

Angela didn't like the insects right away. It turned out that crickets taste like dirt. The drink, consisting of powdered crickets, unpleasantly slid down the throat, and therefore, after taking only two sips, the journalist flushed her smoothie into the sink. I had to go to work hungry and a little annoyed.

For lunch, she was waiting for a vegetable stew with fly larvae, similar to what was recommended to cook in the store. In theory, the flies were supposed to resemble caramel popcorn, but the bugs were not so good. After eating only two spoons, Angela gave up this business and burst into tears from despair.

Suddenly she realized that she was afraid of insects. And Angela is also a vegan, but one who can kill spiders because they are "ugly, hairy and try to lay eggs in your ear", as in these creepy stories from the Internet.

In search of a solution, Angela turned to professor and expert in the field of entomophagy Arnold Van Hys, who called her fear quite normal and advised hiding insects in bread, noodles or pasta. So you can overcome the psychological barrier and eat a hearty meal.

In the evening, the girl tried to eat her lunch again. This time it didn't seem so disgusting, and the fly larvae even resembled shallots. However, she was able to master only half of it — it is impossible to accept the fact that the larvae look directly into the soul.

Angela woke up depressed and decided that maybe she just doesn't know how to cook insects — you need to entrust this matter to professionals. With these thoughts, she went to a specialty restaurant in Melbourne.

There, the girl ordered hummus with crickets and macadamia, which tasted quite good, resembling something nutty. 

Encouraged by her success, Angela decided to cook two fist-sized tarantulas for dinner. It turned out to be a real gourmet dish. At the same time, the neighbors in the apartment could not watch how Angela eats spiders, which caused the outrage of the journalist — they also eat meat, why are tarantulas worse?

Every day Angela became more and more angry from constant malnutrition. She no longer felt agony, only a dull rage.

The day started again with the ill-fated cricket cocktail, this time a little cinnamon went there. I managed to drink only half of it. Angela was angry with herself — what prevented her from finishing this cocktail? She was a vegan for 5 years, and then she couldn't get some crickets!

Angela asked for moral support, and her boyfriend had dinner with her with burgers with grasshoppers. Things went better, but I still couldn't eat more than half of the burger. Both became ill. 

It's time for black ants spread on toast — a wonderful high-calorie breakfast. Angela ate all the toast and felt a surge of pride. By the way, her flatmate also ate a couple of toasts. Apparently, ants don't taste so bad.

Angela decided to skip lunch, and for dinner she planned to arrange a feast of tortilla with Mexican grasshoppers. But she found a blonde hair in a pack of insects and, deciding that it was absolutely unhygienic, went to bed hungry. 

Angela was overwhelmed by depression, she began to write in her diary that she hated everything alive, felt stupid and did not want to live at all. All this was the result of insufficient calorie intake. 

She missed breakfast, and then, due to constant starvation, Angela began to hallucinate. Realizing this, she immediately went to the doctor, where she heard that continuing the diet could cause significant harm to her body. But so far, it was easier for the journalist to starve than to eat bugs.

Angela decided to cheer herself up with something new — the choice fell on a lollipop with a scorpion. It tasted nice, but the girl was constantly thinking about how a scorpion felt when it got into melted sugar.

On the same day, Angela spoke with an expert in the field of diet psychology and food perception, Dr. Matthew Ruby, who said that insects do not suffer much when they die. However, how justified is their death? The meat of one cow can feed a dozen people, and to get a kilogram of dried insects, thousands of living creatures must die. Angela has fallen into an ethical trap. 

Nevertheless, for dinner, the girl had spaghetti with tomato sauce with maggots. One of the friends said that the maggots look like capers, but Angela still burst into tears. 

On the last day of the experiment, Angela decided that humanity has no hope — it is impossible to eat insects. 

The girl made her favorite dessert from childhood — banana pancakes, adding beetles to them. They had to be thrown away. Angela understood that this was just a matter of upbringing, but she couldn't help it. 

As a result, the girl came to the conclusion that insects are not worth any future of the planet. Or at least her personal future. It is better to eat toast with peanut butter. So she did.