Aphids on the lettuces

Last year my home vege garden came under attack from every parasitic insect known. An entire TV series could have been based on the whitefly colony alone. The battles were legendary and we lost every time – except, that is, for the lettuces. They were fine. Nothing touched them. So this year I’m doing my lettuces in the same manner  – in huge pots. This prevents “wilt” caused by dog-who-must-pee-on-everything.

I was making a salad the other night and gave the lettuce leaves a good old whizz-around in some cold water, shook off the excess, wrapped them in a towel and took them outside for a final helicopter-spin to get rid of the last bit of moisture (I could buy a salad spinner but they’re such enormous and ugly-looking things). Midway through making the salad I did notice a lot of “matter” in the sink water but chose to ignore it. I simply stared more intently at the leaves, hoping anything still kicking would wither beneath my steely gaze.

The unvarnished truth is that one of my lettuce plants has aphids. I like to think that washing the leaves got rid of them but I guess we ate eggs and the odd aphid that was really good at holding its breath underwater. We haven’t been harmed (apart from the antennae Mr Scott now has growing from his head and a propensity for clinging to the underside of leaves) so I expect we just had some additional protein. But now I wonder what does a vegetarian do in this situation?

Later that same evening we watched on television a chap all alone (except for the television crew filming him) in the jungle (Amazon basin, probably, I wasn’t paying enough attention), just surviving. That’s all he was doing. I think they were attempting to show you what to do in case your plane ever goes down in dense jungle and you want a food source beyond eating your fellow travellers à la the 1973 rugby-playing Andes plane crash survivors. (As the single engine of the plane I’m in sputters and dies over Peru I’ll rue the day I paid more attention to the Sudoku [difficulty - medium] than I did to the television.) There is a point here, though. What I do remember is the chap eating termites, really little ones, and they had more protein than a bodybuilder’s breakfast shake or something like that. These things were little protein bombs and he said they were rather tasty, too. Unfortunately, later that night he got a terrible stomach upset which made for truly fascinating viewing. He blamed it on the water but I’m not so sure.

Questions:

1.       Should we be concerned about eating aphids?

2.       If not, should we warn any vegetarian dinner guests that their salad could contain insect proteins?

3.      If we should stop eating aphids immediately, how should we treat the lettuce given that we strip leaves from it on a daily basis so really don’t want to spray it with insecticide or detergent or dog pee?