Friday, March 3, 2017

Cordon blargh!


I'm more than a little nauseated by the latest 'advance' (?) in baking ingredients.

Two scientists from the Federal University of Rio Grande in Brazil have developed a flour made of cockroaches that contains 40 percent more protein than normal wheat flour.

Food engineering students Andressa Lucas and Lauren Menegon discovered a new way of producing cheaper yet still nutritious food with the cockroach flour, since it contains a large amount of essential amino acids and some lipids and fatty acids as well—the keys for a balanced and healthy human diet.

The cockroaches in question are not the ones we see running (or even flying—AHHHHH!) in our houses, though. They are the species Nauphoeta cinerea, a different one than we find in city sewers or drains. Researchers buy the insects from a specialized breeder, where they are hygienically produced and fed on fruits and vegetables to meet all hygiene requirements required by ANVISA, the Brazilian health surveillance agency.

The study supervisor, professor Myrian Salas Mellado, says that ten percent of the cockroach flour could replace wheat flour in a given recipe, so cockroach flour bread loaves keep the same flavor as their non-insect counterparts.

There's more at the link.

I don't care who you are.  If you feed me anything containing cockroaches - ground-up or otherwise - and I find out about it, there's likely to be murder done . . . just as soon as I can stop throwing up, that is!  That's not cordon bleu - that's cordon blargh!




Peter

14 comments:

trailbee said...

What is the point of the hybrid cockroach flour? Why didn't they use the roaches from the streets and sewers to get rid of them? Not healthy enough?

Anonymous said...

Peter - you are eating cockroaches and mouse poop/body parts in everything you eat. The USDA allows so many parts per billion of foreign material all food stuffs. Judy

Your welcome!

Old NFO said...

Judy beat me to it... but NOT in those proportions... Sigh

Mark Matis said...

Well maybe not, Old NFO, unless you eat at Chipotle...
}:-]

Eaton Rapids Joe said...

But it is gluten free!

Feather Blade said...

@trailbee: the point is to develop alternate food sources when the the population of the Earth increases to the point that there's not enough real food to go around/ when global warming destroys all of the farms and arable and in First World countries.

Alternately, these people are trying to make "Things you eat when you're starving" into mainstream food items... I guess so that there's less of them for the actual starving people to eat.

deb harvey said...

i eat insects all the time.
i process them through a chicken first, then i have a 'jammy egg' on toast--gluten free.

C. S. P. Schofield said...

Shrimp are basically seagoing cockroaches, or many of them are. They are bottom feeders, and concentrate things like iodine in they systems, which is why (as a gout sufferer) I can't eat seafood (drat it!).

But in general, I agree that this is a part of the long-going "We are running out of food and the population is exploding!" narrative that the Progressive Left has been heavily invested in since the 1970's at the latest.

shugyosha said...

A. Soylent Green
B. What does lord Mark Vorkosigan's lawyer say?

Take care.

Ferran

Elizabeth said...

Hi shugyosha! Thanks for the bug butter reference! Some of my favourite books :-)

Anonymous said...

I'll just leave this here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIO9yzmWYC8

Al Bundy is my hero, antidote to the Huxtables, Cleavers etc.

=TW=

clark myers said...

As noted, insect parts are ubiquitous. In fact vegetarians in the third world can count on getting enough of some B vitamins and such to stay healthy while folks in the UK who think they are eating the same way they did on the Indian sub-continent are deficient in insect parts and so micronutrients.

If you fall into a contest with snake eater types remember to crunch a live cockroach hard first thing. Things crawling in the throat are disconcerting.

Anonymous said...

But ... but ... are they organic, free range and sustainably harvested cockroaches? You'll never get the SJW's and right on people to eat them if they are not.

Phil B

JWM said...

Nasty. But then again-- shrimp, crabs, lobsters. Can you imagine turning over a rock in a field and watching several dozen shrimp go squirming away into the grass? Or if you found one of those giant king crabs feasting on a dead possum in the woods? How about digging for lobsters? If they lived on land we wouldn't eat them.

JWM