Posted on 07/16/2008 12:28:50 AM PDT by Schnucki
A new, abundant and environmentally friendly source of protein is creating some buzz
The world is getting hungrier. After years of falling food prices, eating is suddenly getting expensive. With price-tags now rising some 75%, the World Bank estimates that the soaring cost of food will push 100m people into poverty. What with rising fertiliser prices, increasing concerns about deforestation and unreliable rains brought on by climate change, how will we find new sources of nourishment?
Scientists at the National Autonomous University of Mexico have an answer: entomophagy, or dining on insects. They claim the practice is common in some 113 countries. Better yet, bugs provide more nutrients than beef or fish, gram for gram.
Meat provides just under one fifth of the energy and one third of the protein humans consume. But its production uses up a hugely disproportionate share of agricultural resources. Feed crops gobble up some 70% of agricultural land, while a quarter of the world’s land is devoted to grazing. Brazil’s burgeoning livestock industry is responsible for huge swathes of deforestation in the Amazon.
As developing countries get richer meat’s ecological footprint is set to get even bigger. The Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) at the United Nations considers livestock “one of the top two or three most significant contributors to the most serious environmental problems, at every scale from local to global.” It predicts that the world’s demand for meat will nearly double by 2050.
Eating insects does far less damage. For one thing, the habit could help to protect crops. Some 30 years ago the Thai government, struggling to contain a plague of locusts with pesticides, began encouraging its citizens to collect and eat the insects. Officials even distributed recipes for cooking them. Locusts were not commonly eaten at the time, but they have since become popular. Today some farmers plant corn just to attract them. Stir-frying other menaces could help reduce the use of pesticides.
But insect populations vary with the seasons, and it is hard to control the amount on offer at a given time. “There is very little knowledge or appreciation of the potential for managing and harvesting insects sustainably,” notes Patrick Durst, a Bangkok-based senior forestry officer at the FAO. Those looking for a reliable source of protein might prefer to farm them. Protein makes up a high proportion of most insects’ weight. That makes them much more efficient at converting feed to protein than livestock. For example, a cow yields only 10lb (4.5kg) of beef for every 100lb of feed it eats, whereas the same amount of feed would produce tens times as much cricket.
Academics at Khon Kaen University in Thailand have developed a low-cost cricket-rearing technique, and taught it to some 4,500 families. On just a few hundred square feet of land a single family can raise crickets in numbers large enough to increase their income significantly. Or they can rear them on a smaller scale inside their homes, within large containers. The insects do not require much food or water, grow fast and reproduce quickly. And if they somehow perish, the financial impact on a poor family is far less devastating than the loss of a cow or pig.
Earlier this year the FAO held a conference in Thailand to investigate the benefits of eating insects. The mood was optimistic. “In certain places with certain cultures with a certain level of acceptance”, insects could be seen as part of a solution to end hunger, Mr Durst said.
Environmentally and nutritionally, insects are more appealing than meat: you get more for less. But persuading flesh-loving, ento-phobic westerners of this is going to be tricky. “We’re not going to convince Europeans and Americans to go out in big numbers and start eating insects,” Mr Durst concedes. The trick might be to slip them into the food chain on the quiet. Supplements composed of insect protein could be added to processed food and perhaps also to animal feed. That might help to make meat a little more environmentally palatable.
Some of us have had bugs for dinner before, and aren’t “environmentalists” - but rather have had to spend some time surviving on what we could find to eat.
:)
Depending on the BUG though.... I’m honestly quite happy with red meat from cows, deer, elk and other critters that are a bit higher on the food chain.
i have eaten live grubs before. not bad. just hold the head (do NOT eat the head!) bite down, do not chew, and swallow. great protein in the jungle. and you cannot get much fresher than still moving!
Well, don't expect me to kiss you either. :P
hahaha
Good. Thanks!
I suppose there are a lot of motorcyclists who have developed a taste for bugs, too. :)
LOL!!!!!!!!
Yeah, I’m thinking it’s less of a taste for them, than perhaps a necessity!
In my case, I’ve tried a few things doing survival training and in a couple cases where I didn’t have much other choice (real survival stuff).
I won’t go back to bugs... unless I HAVE to, and if someone starts sneaking them into my Soylent Green, we’re gonna Tango...
All the libs and government douches can eat bugs, I won’t.
If they are made to eat bugs, as they want us to do, there will be more of the good stuff left for me.
What nonsense. There is no proof of this at all. Weather has always varied region to region, that's just the way the earth works. No year is the same as the one before it.
The only concern of "deforestation' comes from enviro-mental moonbats, who continuously spew baseless stories of doom and gloom to scare uneducated populations.
There is no food shortage in this world, nor is there any reason to worry we can't produce enough food now, or in the forseeable future. Nor is there a shortage of land to grow it on. There is an abundance of arable land now, in fact because of modern farming techniques, a lot of airable land has been allowed to revert back into wild hayland and scrub, because the markets are saturated from too much crop, driving prices down below production costs.
Oil prices have a direct impact on the cost of food at many levels, It costs the farmer more to grow it, more for the fertilizers (a petrolium product) to grow it, and to truck it to market. High oil prices add to the cost of food processing, and to the cost of shipping that processed food to the grocery store. Higher oil prices cost the grocery store more for the electricity needed to refrigerate and store those products, it costs their delivery trucks more to deliver that food to it's customers.
And just who is doing all they can to make the price of oil go up? The same enviro- mentalist moonbats, Marxist nutcases in persuit of global marxist governance, self appointed and/or selected not elected executive that run the various NGO's that inhabit the rooms at the UN, all of whom use funds governments of this world rob their citizenship of, not for the programs these NGO's are supposed to be running, such as food aid, but to push this global warming LIE, which is nothing but a SCAM to rob the citizenship of productive western countries and fund their attempt to create a global marxist dictatorship.
you're right. A cricket destroys and wastes through feces far more crop than it's carcass retains as a protein source.
A cow produces about 2-3 lbs a day of good solid beef on a bale of hay a day. Plus it's poo is a good source of fertilizer; or in turd world countries, can be dried and used for cooking fuel, mixed with straw and clay and used as mortar, mixed with waste and used as stock for a bio digester producing methane gas to run a generator, or gas for a stove.
The hide is used for leather products, shoes etc. and other parts are used in medicine, cosmetics, glues, and other industrial products.
Nothing is wasted.
Bugs, besides swarming and destroying your cereal crops, carry diseases and are otherwize nothing but annoying, serving no purpose on earth at all, except as things envirokooks label as "animals" and use to hold up development of infrastructure to make life more bearable.
Sometimes they can be used as bait to catch a more appealing source of protein called fish.
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