You are probably familiar with barbecue-friendly animals like cows and alligators. These sit high up in the backyard food hierarchy. Lower on the ladder, but no less tasty, lie edibles like corn, shrimp, and the meat-like-mystery-paste that hot dogs are made of. We are all about to become intimately familiar with an even lower layer in the grilled-food web. And by “intimately familiar” I mean in the husbandry sense. And by “husbandry sense” I refer to the raising, caring, killing, and eating cycle of said food.

I don’t mean “husbandry” in the marrying sense. Marrying your next meal is still illegal. Probably.

Before revealing what this new, delicious, food consists of, I have to ask a serious question. Have you eaten yet? If not, you may want to pause here, fill up, and come back. It’s a long time until the next meal.

Our new mystery cuisine diktat is the lowly-yet-populous insect. In order to save the planet, we must all stop eating savory food and begin eating bugs. Eighty-percent of the people on the earth intentionally eat bugs. And soon, those of us living in societies based upon classical Western Culture will be among them.

Environmentalists, Vegetarians, and the United Nations are just beginning this push. The Swedish government is spending a half-million kronor on each of fifteen different projects tasked with coming up with a “meat alternative” by November. They are serious about this; governments don’t fritter away money on frivolous projects.

I wish I lived in Sweden. I’d do something creative with Spam and pocket the difference.

A shockingly large variety of insects are available for your culinary pleasure.  A small sample includes: mealworms, caterpillars, crickets, cockroaches, moths, flies, grasshoppers, termites, ants, bees, locusts, butterflies, scorpions, ladybugs, beetles, and grubs. If it has six or so legs and you can get it past your pharyngeal wall you can digest it. Your backyard contains a veritable buffet of nutrition!

Insects can be processed into a wide variety of forms. I conducted research in lieu of lunch to discover this. Picky eaters will enjoy their bugs roasted, puffed, powdered, dried, crouton-ed, pasted, mashed, and chocolate-ed. Just wait until our food conglomerates work their magic! By 1 January 2021, it will be a whole new food decade!

Insect farms are efficient and healthy mom-and-pop operations. They have names like Reclaimed Soil Gardens, Hidden Edibles Ranch, and Don’t-Ask-Questions Meadows. They don’t use fertilizers, seeds, growth hormones, pesticides or radiation. Monsanto will take care of that problem. Everyone knows that 1950s-style mega-bugs will feed many more people than the minuscule insectoids we have today.

I can sense your skepticism and rising bile from across the internet. We’ll eat bugs and we’ll love bugs and we won’t miss meat products. Not even bacon. We’re Americans! We’ll have a marketing push so expensive it will make the pile of money we spend on political advertising look like an ant in comparison. A Giant Tropical Ant, but still smallish.

Katy Perry will eat crickets in her videos and she’ll make it look sexy. Do you really think Katy Perry fans will be able to resist this new, hip, super-easy way to signal their love for the environment? Virtue is just one juicy thorax and a pair of paper-like wings away. NFL stars will brag about the protein content of puffed caterpillars. George Clooney will lecture us about the low-fat benefits of roaches. I think it will be roaches. George Clooney seems like a roach-guy to me.

Whatever swimsuit model Sports Illustrated hires to grace their cover will brag to the world how her curvy 400-pound exoskeleton was the result of eating termites by the garbage-truck load.

We’ll even have reality shows featuring hipsters digging for large, juicy, gourmet-quality bugs. They’ll only want to check the freshest meadow muffin piles. Everyone knows the largest and strongest bugs invade a new food source first. If hipsters digging through fresh manure to find six-legged morsels unironically doesn’t appeal to the Americana Boobicus television market, we’ll get Katy Perry to do it. Katy Perry nosing through fresh cow patties looking for food? That’s must-see TV.

Besides, we already eat bugs. The worm in a bottle of tequila? You’ll probably down that thing when celebrating Cinco de Mayo today, especially after reading this post. Honey? It’s bee barf. I’m not sure what insect Rice Krispies are made of, but Snap, Crackle, and Pop are not just cute spokes-toons. They refer to the noise made as each bug is processed into a more consumer-friendly form. Then they spray it with vitamins and “Bland Spice #6” afterwards. Yum.

That Rice Krispies line might have gotten away from me. Consider it hyperbole, especially if you work in the legal department at Kelloggs, Inc.

With governments pushing this effort, it is hard to imagine how they’d screw it up. I’ve never been one to back away from a challenge, though, so I’ll present my thoughts. Remember that you are receiving this speculation from a cultural libertarian humorist. You brainier types can feel free to include your own thoughts in the comments.

First of all, driving will probably have to be illegal. On our recent vacation our car ended up covered in wasted calories. Maybe they’ll just charge an extra illegal-harvesting fee when you get your plates renewed. The government will then invest the money in extra mosquito farms along interstate highways to replenish the billions of nutritional units squished against our windshields each year. Nothing could go wrong with that.

Better hope your house doesn’t catch termites! The harvesting company you’ll hire to save your foundation will have to report you for having an illegal insect farm, which will carry a hefty fine. Then the IRS will charge taxes for the money you could have made selling your crop. Finally, FEMA will charge you with hoarding food, since everyone will be starving in the future. You know, because we will each need to consume approximately two gallons of insects each day. Who knows how large a fine that will carry. It sounds expensive.

Our planet is dying, and if eating bugs is necessary to save it, then eating bugs is what we’ll be forced to do. Scientists scienced the segments out of it. Leonardo DiCaprio conducted the peer review over a steak and lobster dinner. It’s settled, people. Anyone who disagrees will be thrown into prison and forced to eat spiders. Spiders aren’t insects. Eating them is gross.

Nobody said saving the planet would be tasty.

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The Spork Speaks — Tempest in a Teardrop — tempestinateardrop.wordpress.com