Are you bugged enough to act?

A cheering recipe for high tea

When we were young, my sister and I were driven by our parents on Are-We-Nearly-There-Yet trips to a remote cottage in the back of beyond. On the long journey, we were assigned a single job. Each time my father pulled into a garage, we had to leap out and while he filled the tank, we were to grab a squeegee and scrape away the smashed corpses of the insects which had slammed into the windscreen.

Not too long ago, I drove a Mercedes Sprinter van laden down with furniture 525 miles from the Isle of Mull in Scotland to London. Heavy as it was, I had to refuel twice. Only when I pulled up at my destination did I realise on neither occasion had I washed my windscreen. It hadn’t needed cleaning.

Every year from now on, it is possible we are moving closer to becoming obliged to write insects into our diets. Will there be enough to go round? In Laos not so many years ago, the Hmong family I was staying with sprang into a fervour of activity as a sudden cloud of mayflies swarmed about the hurricane lamp hanging from the ceiling of their stilt house. They ran for a washing up bowl of water and held it under them. As the creatures tired, they fell into it and drowned. The family drew their hands across the surface to strain off their floating wings and feed them to the chickens scratching around our feet then quickly fried the insects’ bodies with garlic, a rare treat.

This free Loatian delicacy provides only one bowl a year; but other insects in other countries are a foraged staple. Travelling on local buses through Cambodia, Thailand and Vietnam, at each stop we made, women approached below the windows with the huge circular reed trays beloved of western interior designers, piled high with beetles. Fried and sprinkled with soy sauce, I crunched them with relish. In Mexico, I ate grasshopper tacos. Grasshoppers are commonly consumed there as in other Central American countries - even, perhaps less commonly, in José Andrés’ Washington DC restaurant, Oyamel. In Uganda each April and May, and in the months from October to December, Ugandans set out to trap grasshoppers. Fried and salted, they are high in fibre and omega-3 fatty acids. Yet last November, they appeared for only seven days. So consider the plight of birds, whose future is already a cause for concern. Swifts, for one species, need as many as 100,000 flying insects a day to survive.

Nutritious vegetables, too, are under threat. To increase supplies of produce, the developed world is growing hybrid versions. These have a significantly longer shelf-life in supermarkets than heirloom varieties. Take the tomato: a hybrid has three saleable weeks versus an heirloom’s height of visual perfection of three to seven days.

Hybrid tomato by amjd rdwan on Unsplash

An heirloom tomato

The hybrid’s longevity comes at a price:

• 63 percent less Calcium, which helps build bones and teeth, regulates muscle contractions including heartbeat 

• 29 percent less Magnesium, which regulates energy, blood pressure, blood glucose, muscle and nerve function 

• 72 percent less Vitamin C, which helps make collagen. Eating heirloom tomatoes may be more effective than any of those pricey (and dubious) elixir-of-youth treatments

• 58 percent less Lycopene, which provides sun protection, better heart health and lower risk of certain cancers

• 56 percent less Polyphenols, which protect against oxidative stress, cancers, coronary heart disease and inflammation

What would you prefer - a beautiful tomato modified for greater yields? Or a nutritious one possibly with physical imperfections and a very short shelf life?

In 60 years, the 70 most consumed fruits and vegetables have lost 16 percent calcium, 27 percent Vitamin C, 48 percent iron.

You don’t need to accept this. Supermarket chains have teams of specialist buyers responsible for deciding what products to stock. They base their decisions on identifying customer needs. They study you and your buying habits, analysing your sales data, your pursuit of trends, and the market research you unwittingly provide through your purchases. We are what we eat. If you are fortunate enough to be unconstrained in the choices you make over what you buy, you have influence with supermarket suppliers. If you’d prefer nutritious produce, tell them. The more people insist on better food, the cheaper it will become for everyone.

Food, its production, its nutritional value, and its availability, has become a political issue. This year, more voters than ever in history will head to the polls. At least 64 countries plus the European Union could be holding elections. Their combined number represents around 49 percent of the world’s population. The results could have consequences for decades to come. Watch the first 2 minutes of this 4-minutes clip from ‘Network’, Paddy Chayefsky’s study of power, the media’s manipulation of the populace, and a world reduced to quantifying everything as data points. It was made almost 50 years ago.

Here’s a ploy to cheer you up: A fabulous American friend and her stylish daughter came to stay. What they most wanted to do was eat classic British teas. They went from one at Fortnums to one at the Grand in Brighton and back to London for the Mad Hatters’ Tea at The Sanderson. The English meal that made them most content, they had other reservations up their sleeves. The photos below are too big. But so were the teas…

You don’t need a recipe for high tea but you do need this trick. I invented it when asked to contribute Britain’s National Dish to a Washington DC event. Assuming Marmalade On Toast would not satisfy, I settled for High Tea. To simplify making finger sandwiches by the many dozens, get the baker to run your sandwich loaves longways not sideways through the slicer and bin the two long exterior crusty slices. Then all you need to do is butter and spread each incredibly long inner slice with your filling of choice, slam another long slice on top then cut off the remaining crusts top and bottom and slice them into fingers.