Latest chinese dish is an agrobiodiversity bridge too far: another option.
Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog
Agrobiodiversity is crops, livestock, foodways, microbes, pollinators, wild relatives …
Latest chinese dish is an agrobiodiversity bridge too far: another option.
One must agree that it is the perfect solution. Have you heard of integrated pest management (IPM) or integrated pest control (IPC)? That’s exactly what we could call it. Most of these creatures’ meat is rich and nutritive, so why not using it as nourishment? I didn’t see any mentioning of a possible danger to the people eating it. Does it exist? I would be the last to know but it would be interesting to check. I think the attitude towards certain things and animals are more cultural and unconscious rather than a considered reaction. Although I don’t like rats and snakes, I love eating snails. To many it will sound as disgusting as rats are to me, but that’s the way it is. I don’t know how snail eating started in my country of origin, Portugal. I don’t know if it was by necessity, curiosity or, as there were so many (by the millions) on the cereal stubble, as the best method of control! In Asia they eat deep fried crickets, in Mexico bugs, in Portugal and Morocco snails, etc. For instance, in Portugal, natural catching of snails on cereal stubble is no longer enough to meet the demand, so snails are “farmed” and even imported, e.g. from Morocco. The story intrigued me and got me checking for more use of rats and I found another great story of useful rats. Rats that have been trained to sniff out unexploited land mines. Fantastic. That goes on in Tanzania and Mozambique for example, and has been saving many lives and limbs. They still give me the creeps but I find them a little bit more useful than before.