The name of my website is “Eat The Weeds (and other things too.)” If you wander around the long index — or click on the category “critter cuisine” — you will find other edibles, such as anoles, scorpions, grubs and snails and things like that. To expand choices I have been adding edible insects. No, I am not going to launch into a lecture on how if we ate more insects we could save the world. But…
Those who follow my writing know I do not care for lawns as residential features. They just aren’t green. They’re fine for golf courses and cemeteries, but I think a lawn with every home is a costly affectation. How costly? Let’s look at one little corner of it.
Lawn + Cricket = No Fun
Locally there are three mole crickets, ugly-looking burrowing insects. Two of them arrived here from South American about a century ago and are a disaster to lawns. In fact, we spend hundreds — hundreds — of millions of dollars to get rid of mole crickets, and yes they are edible. In some parts of the world they are close to a protein staple.
If we didn’t have lawns we wouldn’t have a mole cricket problem, we wouldn’t spend hundreds of millions of dollars, and I’d have a few less bugs to eat. In a goodwill gesture I will give up mole crickets if folks give up their lawns. I really just want to point out that the idea that we must have lawns leads to we must fight mole crickets. Getting rid of lawns just isn’t in that thought process, nor is eating mole crickets, nutritious as they are. (See Mole Cricket, Kamaro)
I have a difficult enough time getting people to eat weeds so I’m not even going to try to get folks to eat insects. They are either interested or they are not. But it does seem to me the money spend on lawns and defending them could be better spent elsewhere.
