Transcript:

Edible Insects - Culturemusic; ambience: crickets In different cultures, what's considered good is eat is in the eye and stomach of the beholder. I'm Jim Metzner, and this is the Pulse of the Planet, presented by the American Museum of Natural History.Faith D'Alusio is co-author of Man Eating Bugs, a book which looks at the different cultures around the world where insects form a regular part of the diet. "North Americans seem to have a very big problem with insects. Mostly because we've grown up to detest them. These are the creepy crawly creatures of our imaginations. When you call someone an insect, that's not a good thing and 'don't bug me.' All of these little phrases that essentially tell you exactly what we think and our neighbors to the south of us in Mexico don't have that aversion. In fact they're probably a little bit closer to their culinary roots than we are. "Once you sit down with people in a culture and start talking to them, you lose a lot of your own preconceptions about what food is and really what life is, you know. When you walk into a rondeval in South Africa-- it's a round house with a thatched roof and and there are no corners because they don't want any evil spirits to lurk there-- it gives you a different feeling. And when you wake up in one and walk outside and your host and hostess are making breakfast and it's Mopane worms cooked with a little bit of tomato, and we eat it with porridge, it doesn't taste like those things I like to kill when I'm back here in the United States."Although we like to think of ourselves as these people who are incredibly knowledgeable about the world, we actually know very little." For thousands of years, insects have provided a reliable source of nutrition to many cultures around the world. Additional funding for Pulse of the Planet has been provided by the National Science Foundation. I'm Jim Metzner.