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If only we could get over our squeamishness, insects can save the planet, banish hunger, protect the rainforests and reduce the climate catastrophe. At least, that’s what article after article tell us as they sing the praises of feeding our food waste to insects like the larvae of the black soldier fly. Insects can grow 5000-fold in 12 days, producing prodigious quantities of protein in less than 100th the space of soya beans.

There’s just one fly in the ointment, so to speak. Most of the food that insects are fed isn’t waste at all, and after absorbing large amounts of investor cash, some of the biggest companies have gone bust. Dustin Crummett, executive director of the Insect Institute, shared his many reasons for saying that eating insects will not save the planet.

Notes

1. Dustin Crummett is executive director of The Insect Institute. His paper: Is turning food waste into insect feed an uphill climb? A review of persistent challenges.
2. If not food or feed, how about “valuable raw materials for various industries”?
3. Here’s the transcript. You can thank the donors, and become one yourself.
4. Cover photograph from designer Katharina Unger’s Farm 432 concept, “a fly-breeding device for home use that continually collects fly larva as a protein source for less squeamish diners”
5. Banner photo by Muhammad Mahdi Karim from Wikimedia shows black soldier flies making more black soldier flies.

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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 24:32 — 22.6MB)

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Xylella fastidiosa is a bacterium that attacks all manner of plants. It prevents water getting to the leaves, so the plant essentially dies of drought. It probably arrived in Italy in 2008 but wasn’t really noticed until 2013, attacking a few trees around the town of Gallipoli in the Salento, the heel of the boot of Italy. Thanks to badly botched responses it spread, carried by spittlebug insects that live in the plants under the olives. By 2019, efforts to control the spread of Xylella were more or less abandoned, and the disease had killed 10 million olive trees in the Salento.

People – including me – thought it might be the death of olive oil production in the Salento and the rest of Puglia. In the past couple of years, however, literal green shoots of resistant olive varieties have taken hold, and with them the opportunity for a new industry focused on high-quality, profitable olive oil. To learn more, I went to visit Silvestro Silvestori, who runs The Awaiting Table cookery school in Lecce.

Notes

1. The Awaiting Table Cookery School runs lots of different courses, including an opportunity to plant new olive trees.
2. Here is the transcript.
3. Cover photo of a fiscolo, the jute mat used in older mills to contain the crushed olives in the press. Banner photo of FS17® La Favolosa from iocolivivai

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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 24:42 — 22.8MB)

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Winner of the Guild of Food Writers award for investigative work in 2024, Avocado Anxiety is about more than avocados. It offers a deep look at the implications of the choices we are faced with when deciding what to buy. Local may not always be best for the planet, but perhaps it avoids the worst abuses of labour. And air-freighted is usually terrible for greenhouse gas emissions, but may be good for communities far away.

Some universal truths did emerge from our conversation. Fruit and veg is almost always better for the planet than meat, and homegrown is generally preferable to imported. Exceptions, however, are not uncommon, and in the end questions outnumber simple answers.

Notes

1. Avocado Anxiety: and Other Stories About Where Your Food Comes From is available from Bookshop.org and elsewhere.
2. We didn’t discuss the meaning of the word avocado, thank heavens, because the greatest service I can offer is to point out that nobody believes that words like nut or ball actually mean testicle. Let the Nawatl Scholar explain: the word guacamole does not come from the Nahuatl word for “ground testicles or avocados”..
3. The book Louise Gray mentioned at the end is The Avocado Debate by Honor May Eldridge.
4. Here is the transcript.
5. Photo of Louise Gray by Nancy MacDonald. Others scraped by me from Instagram.

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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 26:57 — 24.8MB)

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Water is tricky stuff. It can be limpid and clear but dangerous, home to harmful bacteria and parasites. It can be murky, but perfectly safe to drink. It may smell of chlorine, which puts people off, but perversely that is a sign that no bacteria are present.

So how do we judge the quality of water? That’s the subject of a new book — The Taste of Water — by Christy Spackman at Arizona State University. She looks at the history of water purification and efforts to understand the complex interplay between the quality of water from a public health standpoint and the sensory perceptions that people use (or don’t use) to decide whether they trust it.

Notes

1. The Taste of Water: Sensory Perception and the Making of an Industrialized Beverage is published by University of California Press. Christy Spackman’s website offers insights into her work.
2. Wichita Falls, the town in Texas that used recycled water to cope with drought, is proud of its water purification. Scientific American had an article about the project.
3. Lithium in spa waters? Yes! See Lithium with your tonic, Sir? in the magazine of the Geological Society of London.
4. Here is the transcript.
5. Banner photo by me in our local park. Cover photo by gcardinal from Norway, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 25:34 — 23.5MB)

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Cheap supermarket meat has been making life difficult for independent butchers for quite some time now. England has lost 60 per cent of its butcher shops in the past few decades, Australia 80 per cent. I couldn’t find figures for the United States. Against that background, there has been an uptick of interest from young people wanting to learn the skills needed to deconstruct an animal carcass. What surprised me – and of course it shouldn’t have – is that women are learning butchery. I chatted with three of them.

Notes

1. Olivia Potts’ article, which triggered my interest, is The Women at the Cutting Edge of Butchery. She has a website too.
2. Instagram is the best place to find Martina Bartolozzi and while Sophie Minchilli is also on Instagram, she has a website. Both offer great food tours.
3. Here is the transcript.

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