The Unaccepted Blessing of Locusts

Having read a wonderfully informative article in the current Atlantic (not yet online) about the benefits of entomophagy, or insect eating, I'd like to know why Rabbis everywhere aren't encouraging us to eat kosher locusts.[*] Locusts are plentiful, inexpensive, and nutritious. They can be raised and prepared for market, without introducing ethical dilemmas or inviting PETA protests, and unlike your favorite rib-eye, bug protein poses no cholesterol risks. According to estimates I have seen, a kosher family can live quite cheaply and quite healthfully on a diet of bugs.

So where are the Rabbis? Why do they have the energy for fights about modesty or fights about doctrine, but nothing to say about public health? Where is the campaign for locust consumption?

Come to think of it, this same set of questions might be asked about the rabbis and their reluctance to throw their beef-fed weight behind a campaign for green vegetables, lentils and beans. Those foods are plenty healthy, too. Yet, no one rabbinic seems to have any opinion about them one way or the other. A shame, actually. I mean think of the good it would do if the long bearded-smicha types who are too-happy to tell us dress and how to think, were to take it upon themselves to tell us how to eat. Suppose the same Rabbis who urged us to shut our mouths during tefillah were to urge us to take it easy on the kugel following services. Suppose the same Rabbis who refuse to certify pizzerias when men and women sit together, were to withhold certification from grocery stores that display aisles and aisles of snack food. Suppose the rabbis who cover Brooklyn with pashkevils about skirt hems, were to set their printing presses loose in defense of good eating?

And, as Helen Lovejoy would say, "Will someone please think of the children?" School administrators are careful to keep foreign and dangerous influences like baseball cards out of the classrooms, but they are famously lax about what goes on in the lunchrooms. The ayatollahs of Boro Park are guilty of the same crime: They insist that TV be kept out of our dens and rec rooms, but they have no comment about what we put on our dinner tables. Could you imagine the boon to public health if yeshivot universally declined to admit students who come from families the eat unhealthily? Or if they ran Kedushat Habeten programs instead of those dedicated to Kedushat Anayim? Or if they encouraged from their students the same OCD-level anxiety about eating healthy that they do about keeping kosher.

Given the iron-clad evidence about the benefits of healthy eating, and the demonstrable harm caused by sugar, fat and salt, their silent disinterest is altogether perplexing.