Who doesn’t love a good cooking show? There are very few people who can honestly claim to know how to cook proper meals, and spaghetti topped with cold Ragu does not count. TV programs that feature expert chefs either cooking complex meals or berating ambitious cooks are all the rave these days. This is no mystery, as everybody loves a well-cooked meal. However, the enthusiasm that much of the public shows for cooking shows would easily go by the wayside if these shows started featuring edible insects. Nobody wants to see Gordon Ramsay lose his temper over an undercooked scarab beetle; or maybe people do want to see that. In any case, insects are not yet accepted as possible food options for most Americans. Unfortunately, this is not stopping executives from airing a new type of cooking show that features recipes containing edible insects.
The new show featuring professional chefs sauteing termites and frying grasshoppers is being helmed by producer Joseph Giraldi. This show is called Bug Bites, and the cute title will do little to endear the American public to the idea of replacing Big Macs with shredded cricket paddies. However, the clear distaste with which most Americans treat edible insect meals is being largely ignored by Giraldi who claims that the western world needs to catch up with other cultures that value edible insects. This show will be available for streaming starting soon on the SmithsonianChannel.com website and it can be watched on the TV channel called Smithsonian Earth. Each of the program’s episodes will last for around five minutes, which is certainly a short amount of time for a cooking show. Due to the American public’s disgust for everything insect and spider-related, Giraldi does not want to overwhelm his uninitiated audience with long episodes featuring gross-out recipes that include the sorts of bugs that most Americans would just assume have exterminated permanently from earth. Considering the western cultural attitude toward edible insects, this may be a wise choice.
Would you be interested in watching a cooking show that featured edible insects?
