Discomfort food

The delicate, translucent wings keep getting stuck between my teeth but the legs and antennae are easier to get down. They don't quite melt in the mouth, but having them baked into a biscuit takes the edge off the fact that I am eating bees.

The bulbous bodies - with their familiar black-and-yellow stripes - are a different matter, and I chew them up quickly and swallow them.

Shoichi Uchiyama sits across the table and smiles as he nibbles delicately on his own biscuit, which similarly contains about a dozen bees, savouring the roasted aroma and the texture on his tongue.

To Uchiyama, bees represent a pleasant mid-afternoon snack to be washed down with a mug of green tea. To me, they are insects that have no place on a menu.

My dining companion looks at me as if I don't know what I'm missing.

"Of all the insects that I have eaten, I would have to say my favourite was the witchetty grub that the Aboriginal peoples of Australia and some of the Pacific islands eat," 62-year-old Uchiyama says. He describes the plump, white, wood-eating larvae of a number of species of moth as being soft and juicy, and with a creamy texture on the tongue that reminds him of a cut of top-quality tuna.

Uchiyama, by profession the manager of a printing company based in the western suburbs of Tokyo, is a firm believer in the enormous benefits to mankind of consuming insects - he is an entomophagist, to use the technical term - if only the more squeamish of us could overcome our reservations. He has also written two books. The first, published in 2008, is titled Interesting Insect Food and is a selection of his own recipes using bugs from all over the world. The second, An Introduction to Eating Insects, was released last year and is a more scholarly examination of the benefits of consuming creepy crawlies. His aim now, he says, is to have the two books printed as one and translated into English so that he can reach a wider audience.