Fried Grasshoppers: The Provocation from Vicenza

The FAO and the scientific world are looking into insects as a potential food to counter world hunger, and in Italy too someone is dealing with the question.

The Vicenza newspaper Il Giornale di Vicenza recently published the news of a "stunt" carried out in Nanto, a rural locality of the lower Vicenza area where a group of young people, with the help of a local chef, set up on the evening of Monday 12 August a frying stand offering the succulent dish breaded and ready to enjoy: grasshoppers.

The idea arose from the proliferation that grasshoppers had this summer in the locality of Nanto, which severely tested the season's agricultural harvests, in a summer already marked in Italy by countless problems of various kinds and degrees.

With a swaggering manner, the organisers of the stand promoted the initiative with the slogan "grasshoppers against the crisis", a sign that conceals a far greater truth, the ever-latent one of the difficulty (global, and certainly not local) of feeding a growing population at affordable and environmentally sustainable costs.

The use of insects as food, as we have already recalled in a Focus of ours, is a reality widely spread throughout the world, but totally foreign to European and Western dietary models. And yet there would be nothing strange, we reiterate, in the consumption of insects, which in fact present excellent nutritional characteristics, such as to satisfy a good part of a person's individual requirements.
Article source: Il Giornale di Vicenza