Imagine it’s Christmas morning and the children have unwrapped their gifts and emptied the stockings.Everyone sits down for a breakfast of bacon, sausage and eggs … but you serve them a plate of crickets instead.
This isn’t some cruel new form of punishment from Santa. It’s an idea that was floated in The News & Observer last week.
Sound odd? We thought so, but The N&O editors deemed it an idea worthy of print. It published a guest column with this headline: “North Carolina should switch from hog farms to cricket farms.” (They later changed it to read, “For a healthier N.C., let’s eat crickets.”)
The column was written by a UNC student and originally appeared in The Daily Tar Heel. We won’t judge what students choose to write about, but why would the state’s major newspapers reprint such a column?
Well, it fits The N&O’s long-running and misguided attack on North Carolina’s farm families. The column repeats falsehoods about hog farming in North Carolina – and then makes a quantum leap to suggest that we should start eating crickets instead of bacon.
You can’t make this stuff up.
Can you imagine eating crickets for Easter lunch? Tailgating with cricket biscuits from Bojangles? Chowing down on crickets and hushpuppies at your favorite BBQ spot?
Ask a roomful of people if they want to go for that and you’ll likely hear… crickets.