FRIED grasshoppers, succulent silk worm pupae and wasp broods in soy sauce are all on the menu at an Oxfordshire festival this weekend.

Three friends from Oxford – Rebecca Roberts, Charlotte Payne and Annie Zimmerman – will be serving up the insect feast at Tandem Festival near Farmoor.

But the meal is far more than just a stunt, it is a social experiment.

Miss Payne, 28, of South Oxford, is soon to embark on a PhD at Cambridge on the public health impacts of eating insects.

With world population expected to grow to nine billion by 2050, many academics have said huge parts of the globe are missing out on tonnes of protein right under their noses. This weekend at Tandem, she and her associates will run an experiment to see how people react to a plateful of insects.

She said: “In terms of taste, I like the silk worm pupae best.

“I think the first time people taste them, they either love it or hate it.

“The first time I had them I hated it, the second time I liked it and after that they became moreish.

“I have genuinely had silk worm cravings.”

Miss Payne, who currently works at Oxford University’s department of population health, has spent the past few months living in a Japanese village with a family business that catches and sells insects as food.

It involved going fishing for wasps by leaving a little bit of squid out as bait with a tiny bit of string attached to it.

Miss Payne got three kilos of insects from the Japanese business and will be serving then up this weekend cooked in soy sauce and sweet mirin rice wine.

She said the only reason people were averse to eating insects was their upbringing.

She added: “It is simply because we have been brought up to think they are not food.

“In some tribes, fish is considered completely off-limits.”

The workshop at Tandem will see the three friends bring their respective skills to the experiment: Miss Roberts, 24, is a political economist and freelance researcher while Miss Zimmerman, 22, is a psychologist – she will be surveying diners to determine just what it is people have against insects as food.

Miss Roberts, from Cowley, said: “We want to make people realise it’s not this scary thing.”

See tandemfestival.com