Bugs: the film

The Brunel University Anthropology Society presents: 

**Bugs: the film**

A documentary about edible insects

13 November 2017 (Monday), 5.30-7.30 pm, LECT 062 

Are insects the next big superfood? Can wider consumption of these critters really fix problems of global security (as the UN recently suggested)? What do they actually taste like? Join us and our guest lecturer Chris Kaplonski right after reading week for a screening of this fascinating documentary followed by a brief Q&A/discussion afterwards!

 BUGS

For the past three years, a team from Copenhagen-based Nordic Food Lab, made up of chefs and researchers Josh Evans, Ben Reade and Roberto Flore, has been travelling the world to learn what some of the two billion people who already eat insects have to say. In BUGS, film director Andreas Johnsen follows them as they forage, farm, cook and taste insects with communities in Europe, Australia, Mexico, Kenya, Japan and beyond. During their journey they encounter everything from revered termite queens and desert-delicacy honey ants to venemous giant hornets and long-horned grasshoppers trapped using powerful floodlights, which sometimes cause their operators blindness.

Throughout the team’s experiences and conversations in the field, at the lab, at farm visits and international conferences, some hard questions start to emerge. If industrially produced insects become the norm, will they be as delicious and as beneficial as the ones in diverse, resilient ecosystems and cuisines around the world? And who will actually benefit as insects are scaled up?

Are insects a mirror that reflects our broken food systems, or the silver bullet that will fix them?