Monday, July 13, 2009

Eat Bug or Not Eat Bug, That Is the Question

(written July 12, 2009 5:00 am-ish)

In my quest toward eating more local, organic food, I may have just eaten a bug. This was not just any bug, it was a small beetle that looks/looked suspiciously like a little section of one of the blackberries I picked to put in my yogurt.

Maybe I should start from the beginning. I was packing my lunch for work and I decided to try to bring mostly veggies and fruit since I really had already had my main meal of the day-but I still usually get hungry at work. I packed some organic carrots grown by local kids who sold them to me at the Farmers’ Market. I made a small salad using up the last of the lettuce and dpinaceh that I got at the Farmers’ Market on that same day. I decided I also needed to have something a bit more substantial, so I decided on gogurt. (I must confess that the container of plain yogurt in my fridge was not produced or bought locally. I was out of the goats’ milk yogurt that I usually get from Simple Times Farm, and I happened to be at Costco, so…that’s my story and I’m sticking to it!) I went outside around 9pm to pick whatever berries were ripe to use in my yogurt. I have purple smear stains on my arms where I was whacking the mosquitoes as they dive-bombed me by the tens. I think my record was killing six with one whack. (Perhaps my pacifist gene is not so dominant after all.) For every two or three mosquitoes I killed, I spilled one or two berries as my arm jerked with the frantic force of my blows. The blackberries, jostaberries and mulberries are all begging to be eaten, frozen or made into jam, juice or vinaigrette. I picked about a cup of blackberries and picked up about 60 mosquito bites. (Where do they all come from???!)

As I was rinsing the berries and picking out the few bad ones that I had collected in my mosquito-riddled haste, I saw a little beetle... I tried to get it. I thought I did, but then I saw it again. I rinsed again but I didn’t want to be late for work, so I put the berries in my yogurt along with some locally produced honey and…maybe the bug.

I looked at every spoonful and swooshed the berries all around in the yogurt but didn’t see the bug. I don’t think I did. Earlier, when I had seen the bug for sure, it looked an awful lot like one of the tiny dark sections of the berries. And, since it was a beetle, I imagine the hard shell probably crunches like the seeds in the little berry sections. Maybe I didn’t eat the bug. Maybe.

Eating one little bug should not be so disturbing to me. According to my mom, we each eat a bushel of dirt before we die. What she didn’t mention at the time, but that I know now, is that much of what we call dirt is really worm poop.

Maybe I did eat the bug.

2 comments:

  1. Aimee,
    I was fortunate enough to work the "raining shift" (it poured) at the Applewood Open House Day this last Thursday, and low and beyond, I was assigned to work the Japanese Beetle Tent with a box full of hundreds of live beetles that were collected from traps on the estate that morning! It turns out Japanese Beetles love ... berries, and are running rampant over them this year. If you did eat one, just think what you did for the cause of getting rid of one those these pesty bugs that have invaded our gardens and eaten leaves off trees in masses the last few years. They are very hard to kill and seem to be increasing each year.
    Thank you Aimee for your contribution to helping our flowers, trees and produce to survive!! Eat a few more!
    - Chris

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  2. Haaaaaa Haaaaa Haaaaaa.

    By the way, thanks for your e-mail about that. I am so sick of those things eating all of my grape leaves. They even occasionally go for the apples and mulberries too.

    Alas, it was not a japanese bettle I ate. It was a very small black beetle of unknown type. Yummy. Crunchy. Protein-rich.

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