Forget meat: insects may hold the key to sustainable food production – if we can just get over our dietary prejudices.
That's the conclusion of a Belgian academic, who says eating more protein-packed insects will reduce our dependence on carbon-intensive and environmentally harmful meat, and may help combat famine.
Speaking at the Royal Entomology Society conference at Swansea University last week, Professor Arnold van Huis told delegates that insects require less food and resources to farm, and are packed with protein and vitamins, meaning fewer need to be eaten.
“Producing a kilogram of meat from a cow requires 13kg of vegetable matter as feed,” said Van Huis from Wageningen University in Belgium, and also a consultant for the UN Food and Agriculture Organization.
“Yet 1kg of meat from a cricket, locust or beetle needs just 1.5 to 2kg of fodder, and produces a fraction of the CO2 emissions."
The maths is simple, he says: we consume an average 120kg of meat person in the west, while China, currently at 80kg per person, is catching up fast.
“If five billion people eat 100kg of beef or pork then we’ll need to grow an average of 6.5 trillion kilograms of fodder per year. There just isn’t enough space or nutrients in the earth to support that, and the poorest people will simply starve to death.”
Eighty per cent of the world’s population consumes some kind of bug on a regular basis.
Thailand has 15,000 “cricket farms”, which breed the chirruping insects for human consumption, while southern Africa’s Mopane worm industry is worth $85 million, providing much-needed protein to indigenous populations.
To circumvent western squeamishness, Van Huisen said insects (“delicious if cooked correctly”) could be ground into burger form.
He added that it was also possible, though not yet commercially viable, to extract protein to create a “meat substitute similar to the Quorn products we’re already used to”.
