Just wanted to forward this on to you all. If only I had cable, I’d love to see this!

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.