In North America and most of Western Europe, eating bugs isn’t exactly commonplace – at least, eating bugs on purpose (we ingest plenty without realizing it on a daily basis due to lax food processing standards). But in many parts of the world, entomophagy is normal and insects are considered an excellent source of protein, vitamins and minerals.
With a rapidly growing human population and shrinking farmland – due to global warming, overgrazing, desertification and other problems – food is getting harder to come by. Experts warn that in the years to come, things will get even harder as we deal with the effects of climate change. This may lead to a cosmic shift in how we view food; not just how it is grown and processed but the things we choose to eat.
In the face of a growing food crisis, could insects be the next sustainable food source? Last year, a group of experts proclaimed that we could all help the environment by eating insects. We wrote about the gag-inducing descriptions that adventurous gastronomes use to illustrate the flavor of things like giant water bugs – some people say the meat is “perfumey, tastes like salty apples”.
From Discover Magazine:
Gracer wants people to move away from getting their protein from traditional livestock such as cows, pigs, and chickens because raising livestock has a huge negative impact on the environment, regardless of whether the animals belong to subsistence farmers in developing countries or a Western industrial conglomerate (see “Warning: Contains Pork By-Products,” page 40).
A United Nations report released in 2006 calls the livestock sector “one of the top two or three most significant contributors to the most serious environmental problems, at every scale from local to global.” The report notes that, among other adverse impacts, livestock production is responsible for 18 percent of global greenhouse-gas emissions. (That’s more than what is produced by transportation worldwide.) And the problem is only going to grow, with global production of meat reaching 465 million tons by 2050, double the amount produced in 2000.
Raising insects has a low impact on the environment, and there are plenty of them out there in the world already. Consumption of insects is common in Central and South America, Africa, Asia and Australia and has become somewhat of a novelty in North America and Europe with offerings like chocolate-covered ants and salt-and-vinegar crickets.
A website called Food-Insects.com, edited by entomologist Gene DeFoliart, is packed full of information about eating insects, including recipes and a list of bug cookbooks. At Manataka.org, you can find instructions for acquiring and preparing insects for cooking as well as recipes like “mealworm chocolate cookies” and “ant brood tacos”. You can even learn how to raise your own mealworms and crickets for consumption.
Eating bugs for the environmental benefits may not become a popular habit any time soon – but in the future, who knows what we’ll be forced to do. So, you might want to get used to the idea just in case.
Link [Discover Magazine] + [Food-Insects.com] + [Manataka.org]
Photo credit: David Sacks via Outside Online
