I've gotten to know a few meal worms in my time—namely, the ones I used to feed to my son's lizard. I was the only one in my household bold enough to take them out of their containers, pick them up and toss them in the lizard's dish. Didn't bother me and I loved watching the lizard happily gobble those guys up.

Besides reminding me of how I left the lid of the lizard's cage off when I went out of town for a week (so sad), all this meal worm talk brings me to a Slate article about how the UN wants us to eat more bugs—it's the food of the future, not soylent green.

The story in Slate:

Over the weekend I read a bit about Rand Paul's efforts to fundraise off an alleged United Nations plot to confiscate your guns, but they turn out to be up to something considerably more insidious—they want us all to eat more insects. Now, on the merits, the case for insect eating is pretty strong. Bugs are high in protein, much like proper animals, but compared to—say—a cow "they have high growth and feed conversion rates and a low environmental footprint." Which is to say insects reproduce quickly, they grow quickly, and, since they're really low on the food chain, the plant-to-insect-to-food path is one of the least resource-intensive ways of converting solar power into fuel for humans. Of course the problem with eating insects is that it's kind of gross and they don't taste very good. ...

Fear not, dear Tucson. Scanning Facebook this morning, I remembered that the Loft Cinema has put some tasty Chapul bug bars on the menu. Yeah, my son and I split the chocolate and peanut butter cricket bar. Not bad. Crunchy in its own unique way.

There's a cool Tucson connect: The Chapul founders went to grad school here at the UA, but the company is based in Utah. Check out the website here. There's a video on the home page that explains a non-UN version of the benefits of eating bugs. Humanity has evidently been doing it forever.