Cricket Croquettes

Sylvia Shawcross

Now, as the crimes against humanity mount in a world on the precipice of colossal change, our hope lies in Artificial Intelligence. This is the way it will have to be I’m afraid because obviously Natural Intelligence has failed us miserably.

I mean, look at the bloody great mess we’re all in all because we didn’t have “Alexa” there all those centuries to help guide us in the right direction.

Only banksters, politicians and purveyors of the military-industrial complex seem to be thriving while ordinary people carry on in only one of three ways: in complete delusion and/or in a renewed daily state of outrage and/or in awful suffering. Mostly we struggle to pay all the bills and particularly our taxes so that the Gods of Mount Davos can play their games without worrying too much about all those mundane things they’ve managed to foist on us to deal with.

But mostly, subconsciously or not, those of us commoners not driven to hardscrabble lives just yet, become extremely neurotic. We just don’t call it neurotic. We call it all sorts of things like passion for, expertise in, and/or busy with deeply important topics. This leads us to take anything we read online and get ourselves all riled up in the comment section in order to hijack the whole thing as written. We can then expound on whatever our particular passion might be so we can prove what an expert we are to anybody and everybody.

This is to teach anybody and everybody how deeply important and pressing our particular issue is, if not how deeply important we are.

(Which is kind of what happened to my last opinion piece, and I fail still to figure out to this day how 9/11 relates to the dress I was writing about or how I’m some kind of coward for not taking a stand on something I hadn’t even written about or I’m using the wrong email address…. but I digress….)

Some writers, such as myself now, no longer can much worry about what we say because nobody really wants to hear it “as it is” but as it “might” be for “them.” This, you would think, would make the task of writing much easier. I suppose in some weird way it does. I mean, if people are going to read what they want rather than what is there, we writers are just people throwing letters of the alphabet out there like cattle prods to an audience intent on being offended and/or pompously self-enamoured.

So, it really doesn’t matter what we put out there when you think of it. But never mind all that…I’m not in the least bit bitter about it all and have completely forgotten all about that last piece.

Now I am obsessed with the fact that the Gods want us to eat insects.

Given the dire warnings over decades of the decline in the insect population, it really doesn’t make any kind of sense to then dictate we should be eating them but then not a lot makes sense anymore so who are we to question why? The Gods have decreed that the insects will be in our bellies and not on our windshields and we need to accept this.

Since Canada is building the world’s largest indoor cricket factory somewhere in Ontario, producing four billion crickets annually, I went on Amazon and looked up cricket protein.

The only conclusion I can reach is we are all going to starve to death. I mean, is it possible, albeit remotely I’m sure, that they’ve somehow miscalculated all this? If crickets are going to replace flatulent cows then it’s gonna take an awful lot of crickets to make a steak. Which might be why one pound of cricket powder costs $46.25 and if organic $59.99. Canadian.

I can’t imagine how much it must cost to feed organic food to crickets but it’s obviously deeply expensive. And all this because crickets are apparently, by deductive reasoning, not flatulent. Maybe if they fed the crickets to the cows. But I digress again…

At these prices I’m thinking there will be a very real danger that people will start harvesting their own crickets. People will inevitably start mucking about in the wild grasses chirping artificial cricket mating calls and flashing firefly smiles in the night. I shudder to think of what the great final retribution on mosquitoes will be when we start biting them back. But did I digress again? Yes… Probably.

The whole point of this thing is that crickets have rights too.

Long from now, they will be writing about the brutality of the horsefly holocaust or the grasshopper genocide. We will be shamed and heartbroken and will begin erecting statues of giant bumblebees and weevils and dragonflies in the main squares of our smart cities to commemorate their sacrifices to humankind. Little children will hang like monkeys from giant bronze antennae of praying mantises. Pictures will be taken. Museums will be built.

Sad people will shake their heads at the atrocities and old people will talk about how they used to torture worms at the end of a fishing line because they didn’t know better. It will be a shameful chapter in our history.

As far as crickets go, I mean, let’s just face it: they sing. A gathering of crickets is called an orchestra for a reason—they play music in the fields in the summer sun. Crickets sing for their supper and they sing for their mates. They hop about like prairie chickens dancing and rubbing their hind legs in a courtship frenzy.

Crickets obviously have feelings. Maybe only a rudimentary brain of course, but they DO have feelings. And this is all that matters. Why are we putting them into huge warehouses and raising them in little cages without grass and air and sunlight just to grind them up and put them into plastic bags?

How can we silence the music of the green grass? Why are humans so cruel? Save the damn crickets before its too late.

That’s all kind of what I wanted to say. Well, that and I’m wondering how loud six billion crickets can get and whether they’ve got Health and Safety on that issue or not.

Anyway…. Now I get to sit back and see how the comment section will manage to spin this one. It’s what I live for now. Especially the entomologists maybe. Since I’m no expert. On anything really which when I think about it, is probably the most radical thing I do in life.

Sylvia Shawcross is a humourist in a humourless world and can no longer be reached by email really, because you spoiled it.