This Restaurant in Switzerland Is Offering an Insect-based Cooking Class
For those who are tired of the usual coq au vin and tiramisu of cooking classes, a restaurant in Switzerland is offering a new experience for travelers interested in a more experimental side of the culinary arts.
The Löscher restaurant in Bern is offering cooking classes that use insects as a primary ingredient, The Local reported.
“We associate prawns with food but not grasshoppers. However the two animals are very similar,” restaurant manager Andrea Staudacher told local news outlet 20 Minuten.
“A handful of crickets provides the same amount of protein as a piece of beef steak,” he said.
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The cooking classes will use not only grasshoppers, but also flour worms in their muffins and falafel. The restaurant breeds the worms, also known as weevils, specifically for consumption.
While eating grasshoppers, crickets, and other insects might seem foreign and even downright gross to some U.S. residents and Europeans, they have long been a staple in the cuisines of many other cultures in Latin America, Asia, and Africa.
“Eating insects certainly is an old tradition,” Gene DeFoliart, a professor emeritus of entomology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told National Geographic in 2004.
Humans have been eating bugs for the past 10,000 years, according to the same report, and they were a primary part of our ancestors’ diet as hunter-gatherers.
Insects may also be the way of the future, as the United Nations has encouraged eating insect protein as an affordable and eco-friendly alternative to meat.
