As I stare at the bug in front of me, he very much appears to be staring back. It is a standoff, really, and is perhaps caused by my contemplation of possibly eating him and his seeming awareness of that culinary musing from the look on my face.
To date, I have not yet in my lifetime willingly eaten a bug. I say willingly because there was that unfortunate time when a flying insect of some kind chose to whir right by my mouth when I was taking a deep breath during a sermon, preparing to launch into a powerful point of the message. My big launch thus turned into a bug lunch instead, and I have not quite gotten over the feeling of him buzzing and flapping and struggling all the way down my throat, only to join my Cheerios from the morning in my stomach.
But it appears that I may have to put that horrid memory behind me and put bugs firmly and forever on the menu.
This realization comes from a compilation of different news items and videos over the past few months. It began with word from John Kerry, in a Reuters News story of May 10 last year, that slashing farm emissions is “critical to fighting climate change” and that “agriculture generates 10%-12% of greenhouse gas emissions globally.” That belief, I suppose, is what led to a viral video exchange in which a college-age chap in a lovely British accent opined, “Farming needs to stop; that’s the single biggest driver of climate change.”
The second stage in my looming Phasmatodea and Plecoptera pizza dinner, though, was the news that gardening is now apparently deemed an even worse solution than farming. This word came from The Telegraph in a Jan. 22 column, “Carbon footprint of homegrown food five times greater than those grown conventionally.” Five times. So, if farming is destroying the planet, and individual gardening is really really really really really destroying the planet, it seems that greens are, so to speak, off the table.