About 200 years ago, the lobster was regarded by most Americans as a filthy, bottom-feeding scavenger unfit for consumption by civilized people. Frequently ground up and used as fertilizer, the crustacean was, at best, poor people's food. In fact, in some colonies, the lobster was the subject of laws - laws that forbade feeding it to prisoners more than once a week because that was "cruel and unusual" treatment.
Things obviously changed for the one-time prisoner's grub. It's a gastronomic delicacy, the star of festivals, a peer of prime rib.
Much of the conversation about how to solve the coming food crisis caused by soaring population, diminishing resources and a warming planet focuses rightly on technology, reducing waste and improving food access and distribution methods. But equal urgency needs to be devoted to simply broadening our appetites.
Two food sources that strike many as unpalatable - insects and seaweed - could play a critical role in not only feeding the 2.5 billion extra humans expected by 2050, but doing so in a green, climate-friendly way.
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With the exception of honey (bee vomit), insects pretty much reside in "Fear Factor" and "Bizarre Foods" country. But this prejudice against eating insects is slowly starting to change.
A growing number of people are beginning to recognize that bugs, such as mealworms, grasshoppers and crickets, may be the ultimate sustainable protein source. In January 2012, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization held an insect summit of sorts - 37 international experts gathered in Rome to discuss insects in achieving global food security.
Many insects are what you might call superfood - rich in protein, low in fat and cholesterol, high in essential vitamins and minerals like calcium and iron. More important, insects are green super-foods. Bugs are cold-blooded (they don't waste energy to stay warm), so they're far more efficient at converting feed to meat than cattle or pigs.
Ten grams of feed produces 1 gram of beef or 3 grams of pork, but it can yield 9 grams of edible insect meat, according to research from Arnold van Huis, an entomologist at Wageningen University in the Netherlands.
Yet insects still have virtually the same amount of protein as beef or pork. A 100-gram portion of grasshopper meat contains 20.6 grams of protein, just 7 grams less than an equivalent portion of beef.
Insect-eating doesn't have a yuck factor in most of the world. Venezuelans eat French-fried ants. Ghanaians eat bread made out of termites. Thailand has more than 15,000 locust farmers. As pro-bug people like to point out, 70 percent of the world's population eats more than 1,400 insects.
Fear of insect eating is peculiar to North Americans and Europeans. Advocates of a global surge in "micro livestock" - that's the euphemistic term some like to apply to insect farming - are trying to challenge the phobia.
