“Waiter! Waiter! There’s no fly in my soup!” is something we never expect a guest to exclaim while dining out, but will food safety managers need to be ready for that in the future? While we find no trend on edible insects in the United States, the EU has recently begun investigating yellow meal worms as a novel food source. While there isn’t any mainstream call to begin serving meal worms in restaurants all across the US or European continent. Novel foods, like meal worms, bring up an interesting question as to where exactly the line is for what food safety science determines will be safe to eat and what’s not.
Will the Food Safety Industry Embrace Novel Foods?
If we look at the history of edible food, we’ll see ancient cultures considered some foods unacceptable to eat that are common on our plates today while some ate foods we would never think about ordering at a restaurant. Some food historians suggest that unclean or forbidden foods may have become unacceptable due to the illnesses cause by consuming them. Parasites, bacteria and viruses we can control today with proper preparation directed by a certified food safety manager were potentially deadly before food safety science was even a theory.
Other plants and animals have been kept off of plates for centuries because, well, they just seem gross. Who really wants a few crawling mealworms in their salad? But we don’t imagine the first person to see a lobster thought that it might be delicious based on appearance.
According to the study, the novel food, yellow meal worms pose no high-level food safety risks. In fact, the study showed that they’re mainly composed of protein, fat and fiber. All ingredients digestible and usable by the human body.
We’re probably a long way off from seeing insects on our menus, but would you ever consider serving a novel food such as meal worms or other non-traditional ingredient?
