HERE’S A GREAT SELLING POINT

IT CAME with a jar of healthylooking red wrigglers and an instruction pamphlet.

Friends tended to be less than enthusiastic when I took them on conducted tours of the farm.

Nobody praised the fine physique of my stud worms or patted their little heads.

“Yuck,” they muttered through curled lips and backed away.

In the intervening years my worm herd has grown and multiplied and must now weigh at least a kilo, all combined.

They consume all my kitchen peels and scrapings (no citrus, please, the acid hurts their little tummies) and produce a steady supply of rich compost and what we politely call worm tea. The produce gets incorporated in the garden beds and produces the most luxurious weed crop in the neighbourhood.

I recently discovered that I’m by no means unusual in my choice of farm animals.

Right here in Cape Town there’s a thriving commercial fly farm that’s producing tons of pet food from the larvae of black soldier flies and exporting it to pet owners all over the world.

Many people have tasted the products and reported them to be rather delicious. The dried and roasted larvae are said to taste slightly nutty.

In several countries they hunt and eat crickets, wasps and ants and regard them as delicacies, not just last-resort nutrition for starving people.

The farmed flies are given a clean and controlled diet and their larvae are handled hygienically. Come to think of it, many of the things we enjoy eating actually look rather disgusting: oysters, for a start, calamari and snails.

For some reason we’ve overcome our squeamishness about those.

One internet story I read reported that the connoisseurs of some flybased delicacies regard them as more than just tasty: they’re reputed to be powerful aphrodisiacs as well. Now there’s a good selling point. Not only will fly farmers be able to save the world’s starving population.

They’ll probably increase it as well.

Last Laugh

Giant pandas live on bamboo shoots.

The giant panda is a seriously endangered species and there are now fewer than 100 of them surviving.

The reason is that there’s a serious shortage of bamboo shoots.

This is because the local people regard them as a delicacy and love to eat them, particularly with roasted giant panda.