There is almost nothing you can do to stop the coming cataclysm. The pandemic proved that — on an individual basis, life came to a shuddering halt. Greenhouse gas levels in the atmosphere continued to rise anyway.
Diet is one of the few levers an individual can pull that will make a difference. Cutting out or drastically reducing meat consumption, and doing the same with food waste, will actually make an impact, potentially a big one. Meat, especially beef, drives climate change in several ways: forests are destroyed to make way for grazing cows, who then spend their days belching tonnes of methane into the atmosphere while awaiting the stroll to the stunning room
Bugs, on the other hand, arrive on the plate with no such ordinance hidden in their luggage. Insects emit fewer greenhouse gasses and less ammonia than cattle or pigs, and they require a fraction of the land and water needed to rear cattle.
The lines any given culture draws around what it will consume are deeply odd when you think about it for even a minute. Deeply held and longstanding religious and traditional prohibitions are one thing, the active pickiness in most Western countries is quite another. That Anglophone countries in particular largely shun offal and insects, sources of protein happily consumed by billions of people worldwide, is, well, odd.
That the recent vogue for “native ingredients” scarcely involves any of the insects that have been a staple for several Indigenous groups for tens of thousands of years is all the stranger given a decent number of people would eat insects if they had the opportunity.
In a city that considers itself a major culinary centre, it’s wild you have to wait for an event like this week’s “GUTFUL: A bug in the system” if you want to try such a common worldwide ingredient, one often hailed as a significant solution to environmental and logistical problems of food supply — assuming technological calamity or climate change doesn’t bring the whole thing an end.
Held at Victoria’s State Library, “Gutful” is a fun, chaotic and not entirely coherent event, which grapples fairly lightly with all of this, in front of an audience sated by high-end snacks laced with cricket.
I wish I could tell you what cricket actually tastes like, but in each case it was subsumed by its surroundings: added to the salt coating the mouth of our $10 Coronas, it tasted faintly like a beef stock cube. It formed light, gummy pearls in the deep, savoury smack of the Daikon broth, hummed sugar sweet on the fermented tomato and capsicum pate, was an earthy, nutty note at the heart of the mini-chocolate bar, and finally bubbled jelly-like in the coconut “gloop” we had for dessert. Which I suppose is probably part of the point; insects are simply a sustainable form of protein that could easily be introduced into an unadventurous diet and, with a little care and imagination, would be entirely imperceptible.
But it also points to the limitations of such an event. Under the heading “Blueprint for a future food barn”, the accompanying literature tells you to “Decolonise your pantry”. Whether the organisers saw any irony in asking this of an audience they had just served a staple for billions of people across Africa and Asia in a way that studiously avoids challenging the palate of an upper-middle-class white person wasn’t clear.
Much more helpfully, the list tells us to make stocks and ferments from our leftovers, and much more annoyingly, to “make a cute catchphrase”.
The audience, the kind of people who go to stuff like this, added to it. There was an “icebreaker” where audience members were encouraged to say something that bugs them — a guy with thick-rimmed glasses and great hair said “sport being reported as news” and got a couple of audible “finally someone says it” style “yeahs!” from other attendees. The revolution, culinary or otherwise, is coming for these people, not from them.
The highlight of the evening was Catherine Ryan, offering a comedic keynote in the style of a straight-talking inspirational business speaker, here to give us the tools we need to “prepare” for the coming apocalypse. She opens by tossing a tennis ball to various audience members, asking them “What are you going to do when a robot takes your job?” and “What are you going to do when the sea levels rise?” before snapping “Too slow, throw it back” in the bewildered silence. She promises that she has read every book pertaining to what is to come for humanity and there is no eventuality for which she has failed to prepare. Her powerpoint presentation immediately conks out, and we laugh as robot waiters — little rolling bookcases with cute digital faces, their shelves stacked with books about doomsday — float noiselessly up and down the aisles.
She touches on the millennium bug discourse, talking about a commemorative New Year’s Eve tat — plastic tiaras, gold cardboard hats and novelty sunglasses all emblazoned with “Year 2000” — with the reverence of anthropologists talking about the traditional headdresses of a lost people. She plays a truly gorgeous video produced by WorkCover dealing with potential work safety threats from a lack of Y2K preparedness. It just thrums with 1999 energy. She hints at, though doesn’t expand upon, the fact that while we’ve come to view Y2K as a hilariously kitsch media beat-up, it was no such thing — it could have been a disaster, but the people tasked with these things took it seriously and did something about it.
As Ryan concludes, the artifice starts to fall away and Ryan’s character starts to fall into confusion. “But there was something so cosy about the year 2000 deadline. We knew how long we had. Now we’re adrift, grasping blindly toward…“
Her speech is then cut off, she’s gone overtime. It’s part of the joke, but the nasty, cold-sweat truth at its core isn’t allowed to land before the next act begins, an interpretive dance which interacts with an animation on a TV that has been wheeled on stage. I think it was about the interactions between the mechanical and the organic, and cultural associations of insects with death and decay. I also don’t think it was supposed to be funny.
The woman in front of me barely paid attention to any of it, scrolling her phone for the entire evening, like she was gunning to be included in my piece as an allusive image.
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