Plays at The Vic Theatre
808 Douglas Street.
Victoria, BC

May 13, 2016, 7pm
May 15, 2016, 7pm

Food samples will be offered before the screening of this film.

Director Ian Toews and Producer Mark Bradley will be present for a Q&A afterwards.

If you give me a home where edible bugs roam, I can easily snack on them all day like popcorn. Not everyone is keen on the concept, but I’m open to the idea of nibbling on mealworms or crickets. Some folks think of it as just a gimmick to add to the gross factor, but when the apocalypse comes and most of the traditional livestock are gone, irradiated, just what else can a person eat? It’s almost as simple as digging in one’s back yard!

Or you better know the difference between edible fungi and the poisonous ones. Eating insects should not be a shocker. I point out one famous scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark where Dr. René Belloq had some bug climb into his mouth and it never came out. Not even in editing did Steven Spielberg consider cutting that scene out or using a different take (who knows how many times that moment was filmed). If actor Paul Freeman was ever asked about that one scene, I’m sure he’d say it was delicious!

The documentary Bugs on the Menu looks at a new movement of cultivating sustainability in the food market that’s taking place all around the world. Instead of the traditional meats and “the harm” animal rights advocates are opining about, humanity can find a new way of sustaining itself by growing certain bugs for human consumption. People can’t randomly capture them in the wild for concerns over what kind of toxins may be in them, so they have to be raised. Documentarian Ian Toews travels to South Africa, Zimbabwe, and Botswana to learn about what’s being farmed. From Mopane caterpillars to termites, the thought of trying to eat the latter will have some folks gagging at the thought. No, I doubt Indy would have been able to eat his way out of a red soldier ant brigade, but the fourth (and lamented) film in this series did come to mind.

In this movie’s press release:

The answer to feeding the world’s expanding population may be smaller than you might think. Insects are a great source of protein and nutrients, and are eaten by an estimated two billion people worldwide. Toews will travel to countries where this practice is common, and follow people working to bring edible insects to western cultures.

One aspect of this production that’s caught my attention is that Victoria native and filmmaker Andrew Naysmith is in on this journey. He made Tide Lines, another film I’ve seen during the Victoria Film Festival, where both he and his brothers travelled the globe by sailboat to document the effects of pollution on Earth’s ocean’s, and the leftover plastic gunk that floats in these ebbs. I enjoyed watching that film as it was an eye-opener over what little I already knew about that problem (that no government is still working on a solution to). Until we as humans change our attitude towards global change for the better, everything we do to better ourselves can still be learned.