Chocolate chippie chip cookies (with dry-roasted crickets), banana worm bread, savoury patties (with meal worm), bug blox - there are many creative ways to take insect protein. For the squeamish the answer is to crush or use a blender on your insects and cook in a stew to disguise their appearance. The bible for bug eaters is The Eat-A-Bug Cookbook by David George Gordon, also author of The Complete Cockroach.

Good for Your Health

Realistically, few of us will ever be willing to sit down to a meal of sautéed caterpillars or tuck into a bowl of chocolate covered ants for dessert. A greater tolerance towards insects, however, would be good for our health. If we didn't mind the odd worm in an apple - what a bonus! - or object to greens obviously munched by insects, the farmer could reduce the levels of pesticides, substances that are potentially of much greater threat to our health. Those who practise entomophagy (insect-eating) like to point out that 80% of the world's people eat insects intentionally and 100% eat them unintentionally.

    Virtually everything we eat has bugs (entire or parts) within; indeed there are government standards as to the maximum number of bug parts per unit for each type of food.
    - Harvard medical entomologist Rick Pollack

US regulations allow for 75 insect fragments per 50g of wheat flour, two maggots per 100g of tomato sauce or pizza, 20 maggots for canned mushrooms, 60 fragments per 100g of peanut butter and so on). It's estimated that the average person consumes about a kilo of insects a year. And is all the healthier for it.

If you still think you couldn't face a meal containing insects check out the ingredients that go into your morning tub of yoghurt. It is seething with living organisms