1. Night of the Barrels @ Extreme Beer Fest (via Beer Advocate) – I bought my boyfriend and I tickets to this as a Christmas present.  I’m happy about my timing, they’re sold out already! 50+ wood-aged beers will be there for the tasting.

2. A 3-session sewing class. I know the basics but would love learn some tricks, and how to care for my machine.

3. A 2-session Veggie gardening planning class – I can’t wait to get a jumpstart on the garden.

4. Making ice cream – Jeremy got me an ice cream maker for Christmas, and I made key lime pie sherbert last night. Maybe this year I will have that ice cream social I threatened to have last year.

5. A winter weekend – last year we went to Maine in February and it was cold, but great. This year I would love to see some maple sugaring.

6. A spring getaway – somewhere warm but not too far away.

7. Using my restaurant gift certificates – I just got $230 in restaurant gift certificates for $25, thanks to a deal through Borders Perks & restaurant.com.  We’ve been trying to stay on budget and cook at home, so this should give us an excuse to venture out more often.

8. Putting local events on my calendar -There’s always so much going on, and we all need an excuse to leave the house in the winter.

9. Watching Netflix on demand – I hook my laptop to the TV with an HDMI cable, and have 12,000 movies at my fingertips.  I find this much more worthwhile than a cable subscription.

10. Knitting during lunch – my coworkers have a 1x a week knitting group.  Maybe I’ll attempt my first sweater?

11. Walking to work – this will be so great once it’s not a skating rink out there. Yesterday, I took the bus. Yuck.

12. Cast iron – my parents gave us a griddle and large cast iron skillet.  Time to cook up that thick bacon that’s been waiting patiently in the freezer!

I’ve had the pleasure of tasting David’s grasshoppers (or crickets?), which as you can see above, we passed around in a ziploc bag. It’s hard not to caption this photo “Bugs, not Drugs”. I also got to try a very exotic – and surprisingly delicious – water bug at last year’s Food for Thought.

David Gracer of Providence-based, Sunrise Land Shrimp (SLS), will be a featured guest on Comedy Central’s The Colbert Report at 11:30 P.M. EST on February 13, 2008. This appearance follows a whole-page write-up on the company in New York Times Magazine on Sunday, February 10, 2008.

Gracer is looking forward to talking with Colbert, though he’s also expecting lots of curve-balls, and some of the things spoken in humor may not necessarily represent SLS’s official positions.

About Sunrise Land Shrimp

SLS was founded in 2005 and since that time Gracer has given over 30 paid presentations at museums, libraries, schools, and nature centers in roughly a dozen states. He has cultivated food-insects; purchased them from small markets; collected them from the wild; and commissioned people in this country and elsewhere to do the same. His insects have been served on the Tonight Show with Jay Leno, Food For Thought in Providence, and in May he will participate in a judged gourmet cook-off event in Richmond VA.

Significance of Edible Insects
Most important among the many good arguments for entomophagy is environmental impact. Although many consider beef, pork, and chicken to be delicious, it cannot be denied that the factory-farming systems that are required to produce sufficient quantities and competitive prices also involve vast amounts of resource consumption and waste; similarly, the amount of waste material generated at such facilities often overwhelms the local areas where these feedlots, etc are located. Rearing insects as food would avoid most if not all of these problems.

While Gracer and others like him are clearly in the minority in this country, this does nothing to change the facts that support the development of entomophagy around the world. This is why Gracer is committed to doing everything he can to advocate for these practices, including ancillary applications of entomophagy, including the cultivation of insects as a better food source for other animals, such as chicken and fish farms, and the production of insects as fertilizer.