A group of students from a primary school in The Hague are given a very special assignment during a school outing. Anyone who follows Expedition Robinson on TV is probably familiar with the famous food test. Just about every viewer is disgusted by it. But the young students from group 3 in The Hague were really given such a food test. What? At the end of an educational expedition they are rewarded with delicious… insects. OMG?
Students receive an insect snack during a school outing
A school outing is always great fun for students. Then it doesn’t really matter whether they go to an amusement park or museum. In any case, they are not sitting behind the desks in the classroom for a while. Yay! However, students from group 3 of a primary school in The Hague have a very special school outing. The 6-year-old children all went to the Museon museum in The Hague. Here they were sent on an expedition, which was not officially called Expedition Robinson. Yet the expedition was very similar to a test from the popular TV program. What were they supposed to do? So the students had to crack a code, find keys and return objects. They then received a delicious snack as a reward. Or well, delicious? They were rewarded with… insect snacks. Wait, what?
Outraged parents
The students were presented with buffalo worms from the museum, the AD writes. Yep, just the food test from Expedition Robinson! Buffalo worms are freeze-dried worms of approximately 0.5 to 1 centimeter in size. They also received a recipe home with which they could make such a ‘delicious’ insect snack: chocolate muffins with apple and buffalo worms. Um, yummy?
Well, there’s a good chance the recipes went straight into the trash. For example, the parents of a girl reacted indignantly as soon as they discovered what their daughter had eaten. “My daughter has been encouraged to consume insects,” they wrote in a letter to politicians in The Hague. “Normalizing the eating of insects is miles outside our philosophical vision, our worldview and our religious beliefs.” They also include a number of religious objections. For example, Jews, Muslims and Hindustani are not allowed to eat insects at all. And yet, according to the parents, the students were ‘encouraged’ to eat the worms.
Own choice
A spokesperson for the museum says the students were not encouraged at all. “We ask whether they want to try this and have no judgment towards children whether they want to or not,” says the spokesperson for the Museon museum. “This is completely their choice.” They also say – whether you believe it or not – that buffalo worms are often popular. “Our experience is that schools, both primary and secondary education, see this as a fun and meaningful addition,” says the spokesperson. That is why it is sometimes even specially booked by teachers.
According to the museum, two billion people worldwide, in almost a hundred countries, regularly eat insects. With their ‘food experiment’, the museum hopes to bring students and other audiences “into contact with things that they do not encounter every day”. They hope that people will become curious about the new type of food.
