Posted on 01/13/2017 8:28:22 AM PST by Red Badger
WILLISTON, Vt. (AP) -- At Tomorrow's Harvest farm, you won't find acres of land on which animals graze, or rows of corn, or bales of hay. Just stacks of boxes in a basement and the summery song of thousands of chirping crickets.
It's one of a growing number of operations raising crickets for human consumption that these farmers say is more ecologically sound than meat but acknowledge is sure to bug some people out.
Once consumers get beyond the ick factor, they say, there are a lot of benefits to consuming bugs.
"We don't need everybody to eat insects," said Robert Nathan Allen, founder and director of Little Herds, an educational nonprofit in Austin, Texas, that promotes the use of insects for human food and animal feed. "The point we really like to highlight with the education is that if only a small percent of people add this to their diet, there's a huge environmental impact."
Cricket fans say if only 1 percent of the U.S. population substituted even just 1 percent of their meat consumption with insects, millions of gallons of water in drinking and irrigation would be saved, along with thousands of metric tons of greenhouse-gas emissions from machinery and animals.
At least one study finds the claims overstated that crickets are a viable protein source to supplement or replace meat, but bottom line, it generally takes fewer resources to raise and harvest crickets than, say, cattle.
Interest in entomophagy - the consumption of insects - was fueled in part by a 2013 report from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations on the viability of edible insects to help curb world hunger.
(Excerpt) Read more at hosted.ap.org ...
Maybe, Baby
I’ll eat you
Maybe, Baby
You’ll be food
Maybe, Baby
I’ll put you
In me
Closely related to roaches.
One of the boys in my Cub Scouts den likes cricket-protein bars.
Crawl through your arteries. Side effects????
They need to serve all of this crazy stuff like cricket-crisps and meat mats grown in a jar of nutrient solution in the UN cafeteria.
Buddy Holly and the...
This is very mean to the crickets. Personally, I would only eat free-range crickets, raised on pesticide-free organic farms.
No. Their point is that the masters eat meat and the slaves eat bugs.
Organic crickets are waaay more expensive...............
That’s what I got out of it!.................
Crickets and Government cheese could replace EBT cards!
Surely there are 1% on the dole..
Soylent Chow! Now with more insects!
Everything the serfs need to be productive and compliant.
Those little sharp pieces of ecto-skeleton get caught in my throat, kind of like popcorn hulls. And they do damage when they come out the other end, too, like defecating razor blades. Parts of crickets might be protein, but it is still an INDIGESTIBLE form of protein.
Now, eating grubs, or fly larva, that has been dried down to a fine powder, that is almost 100% digestible protein.
Feed the crickets to chickens, then kill, dress out, and cook the chicken.
“sure to bug some people out.”
Bug some people out?!?? Great writing. Sure, people say that all the time. How clever!
Maybe we need to pay journalists more so it attracts better candidates.
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