The Chinese have been doing it for a long time.
Eat bugs for dinner to save the planet
Ben Webster Environment Editor
Published at 12:01AM, November 5 2015
Insects should become the new sushi, with consumers persuaded to overcome the “yuck factor” to eat beetles, ants and grasshoppers as an environmentally friendly alternative to meat, a government-funded report says.
Compared with beef, insects require less than a tenth of the land and a fifth of the feed to produce a kilogram of protein.
More than two billion people eat them regularly and they should become a staple of Western diets, according to the report by the Waste and Resources Action Programme (Wrap), the former government sustainability agency, now a charity.
A third of the world’s agricultural land is dedicated to producing feed for livestock, the report says. Alternatives to meat must be found to prevent the world’s remaining forests being destroyed to feed a global population that is on course to grow by over a billion, reaching 8.1 billion by 2025.
“Western diets will incorporate insects to some degree, in a similar way to the spread of sushi from Japan in 2000s,” the Food Futures report suggests.
Wrap acknowledges that it will be difficult to persuade many people to give up sausages and bacon for locusts and grubs.
“There can be a ‘yuck factor’ for many potential alternatives, such as insects. Western attitudes towards entomophagy [eating insects] are typically negative — insects are perceived as unclean.”
However, the charity thinks that it can win over diners by communicating the environmental benefits of a bug-based diet.
The report states that 80 per cent of an insects body is edible, compared with 55 per cent for chicken, and 40 per cent for cattle. Rearing insects produces less greenhouse gas, and they can be fed vegetable waste, manure, and food waste.
Insects consume only 1.7kg of feed per kg of bodyweight produced, compared with 2.5kg per kg chicken, 5kg for pork and 10kg for beef.
Liz Goodwin, Wrap’s chief executive, said new sources of protein were needed to reduce the risk of shortages caused by climate change and population growth.
“In the UK alone, it will take another five million tonnes of food to feed the UK population in ten years’ time,” she added.
Crunchy Critters, one of Britain’s leading edible insect suppliers, said demand had grown by 60 per cent in the past year, with chocolate-dipped locusts, chilli-flavoured grasshoppers and mealworms among poplar items. Nick Cooper, the company’s founder, attributed their growth to the ITV reality show I’m A Celebrity. . . Get Me Out of Here!, in which participants are challenged to eat insects.
http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/environme ... 604907.ece