Marcel Dicke makes an appetizing case for adding insects to everyone's diet. His message to squeamish chefs and foodies: Delicacies like locusts and caterpillars compete with meat in flavor, nutrition and eco-friendliness.
Marcel Dicke likes challenging preconceptions. He demonstrated that plants, far from being passive, send SOS signals by emitting volatile substances when under attack by pests, attracting carnivorous insects to eat their enemies. Dicke opened a new field of research and won the NWO-Spinoza award, the Dutch Nobel prize. Now he wants to change Western minds about insects -- especially insects as food.
"People hate bugs, but without insects we might not even exist," he says. Dicke's PR crusade began in the 1990s, as a lecture series. Then his team made world headlines when they convinced 20,000 people to attend an insect-eating festival in Waginegen. Today, Dicke leads what he says is fast-growing research into insect agriculture and predicts that insects will be on Dutch supermarket shelves this year. And does the former vegetarian eat bugs? "At least once a week. Locusts are nice cooked with garlic and herbs, served with rice or vegetables."
However, insects are essentially taboo in European cultures. It's really hard to get over that initial step... kinda like cheese in parts of Asia, though there the force of colonialism managed to introduce it to at least the elites.
I think people still need time to get desensitized from misconceptions and this is an excellent strategy.