Camila Mendes Eats Bugs: Celebs Going Green with Food (and Why You Should, Too)

Camila Mendes, the Riverdale actress on the CW, went on a trip to Mexico and sampled the local cuisine… including crickets, and ants, and grasshoppers, oh my! The 22 year-old recently posted an Instagram video of herself nonchalantly eating bugs like you would snack on french fries. 

“It tastes like chips!”, she coolly commented. Thank you, Camila! Chapulines *do* taste like chips. Small, crispy, fried, salty chips! Hats off to Camila for putting on her big girl pants and giving the Oaxacan delicacy the chance it deserves without ethnocentristically ew-ing them off! Now let’s turn our attention to the people in the background of Camila’s video screaming, “Ew, grasshopper! It crunched!”

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Do you know that grasshoppers are the 4th most commonly eaten insect in the world according to the FAO and that entomophagy (eating insects) is regularly practiced by over 2 billion people worldwide? And with good reason.

Sure, they taste good, as Camila mentioned, but consuming insects is also beneficial for the environment. For example, crickets (the 3rd most commonly eaten insects) need 12 times less feed than cattle to produce the same amount of protein. High protein content aside, most insects also serve as good sources of “healthy” fats, fiber, calcium, iron, and zinc. This means that more people could meet their nutritional needs for a significanlty lower monetary and environmental cost if only insects were more widely consumed. Sorry, Jiminy!

Furthermore, insect rearing and transport also emits fewer greenhouse gases and does not require land clearing. Oh, and just in case you were wondering, insects are also less likely than other animals to transmit infections to humans (looking at you chickens with your avian flu).

So listen up screamers: try sprinkling some chapulines on your guacamole and tacos before you write them off. If not for your health, and not out of respect for other cultures, then at least do it in the name of sustainability. And once again, mil gracias to Camila Mendes for normalizing the consumption of bugs; the sooner this catches on, the better off we’ll be. #MicDrop 

NEXT: Bugging Out: 5 Meals Made With Insects!