Itanagar, Feb 10: The young scientists from Rajiv Gandhi University have taken an initiative to popularise the traditional practice of eating insects out of the inaccessible villages of Arunachal to the best restaurants in the world.
After coming back to their lab, they arranged several species of edible insects onto a plate for a picture, and they put a spoon too.
“This is our vision; one day this will happen,” says Pompi Bhadra, a PhD candidate at RGU, studying’ entomophagy in the northeast’.
She is among six PhD candidates at RGU documenting edible insects, from stinkbugs that seem to cause hallucinations in some people to pests that pose a threat to the state’s kiwi plantations.
Building on the age-old tribal practice of eating insects, which for centuries has been part of the regular diet of farming communities in Arunachal Pradesh, the young scientists are trying to learn more about the abundance of the insects, their nutritional profile, and their medicinal properties.
Jharna Chakroavorty has been working to understand the ancient eating practices of Arunachal and pitching them as solutions that can address the global food security problem.
In Chakroavorty’s’sab, a fridge is filled with thousands of creepy crawlies. For a regular visitor, it would be the stuff of nightmares. But she and her PhD candidates represent a shared dream—to put these insects on the world’s finest gourmet menus.
The team now sends its samples to various labs as far as Delhi, Bangalore, Hyderabad, and Bombay for nutritional analysis. Even for that, Chakroavorty has to source dry ice for her samples all the way from Assam, as it is not available in Arunachal.
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