Photo Challenge Week #3 - Food

Shannon - This is a photo of our local Bakery.  It's about 300 yards from our house.  You will find these little bakeries all over the place.  Like everything in Denmark, they are pretty pricey, so we only splurge once in a while, but every time we got to the grocery store, right next to this bakery, we all have to stop and stare through the window for a few minutes and drool over what we would want to choose.  Yum!

Chad - Background:
At work one of my colleges is interested in researching insects as a food source. Yuck right? Well actually there is a lot of sense behind it. Insects are cold blooded, so they don't consume any energy to keep themselves warm. What that means is a much larger portion of the nutrients put in to them are returned as nutrients to the consumer (I think for cows you only get like 20% of what you put into them, insects are like 80%). A lot of interest in insects as a food source is geared towards livestock, realistically it would be very difficult to convince many people to eat insects (although you could have probably said the same thing about raw fish 20 years ago). Well to try to spare my kids of being stuck in the paradigm that insects are gross, for this weeks food-themed photo challenge - I decided to cook them some Tenbrio (mealworms), which are beetle larva that you can get at most pet shops or order by the kilo online to feed pets (birds, reptiles, etc.).  As an insect pathologist I keep them around in my lab most of the time for experiments.

I froze them before I cooked them. Then I decided to fry them with some butter and salt - pretty simple. 

Myra and Noah were very excited about trying them, Lexi was not (I did convince her to hold one for a picture). I ate one first to make sure they tasted ok, and then Myra and Noah joined me. 

They really enjoyed them and kept wanting more, so I had to make a second batch. Once Shannon got home the kids were really excited to show her - she was really grossed out. Lexi, after seeing how much fun her brother and sister were having, decided to try one with a piece of chocolate, once she tasted the first one and realized that they were not so bad she ate several more. 

So now everyone but Shannon had eaten some, so after some persuasion and negotiating I convinced her eat just one, and in exchange I would buy her two of her favorite pastries from the bakery (I think she got the better end of that deal). It took her awhile to finally do it but she did in the end eat one small mealworm with a big glass of water and a lot of gagging.