EATING INSECTS: Will you? For the planet, for health, & saving money?

[Valley Oak]

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Forget The Hamburger; Insects Are Better For You And The Planet

The Huffington Post | By Dominique Mosbergen | Posted: 09/28/2014

By the year 2100, there will be an estimated 11 billion people living on Earth.

With that many mouths to feed, combined with the potential impact of climate change on the food supply as we know it, humans may need to start thinking about changing the way we eat -- or at least, what we eat.
That notion underlies this fascinating new video by The Economist, which explains why we should all consider adding a new kind of protein to our diets: that of insects.

Yep, insects.


This picture taken on August 10, 2014 shows insects waiting to be sold in a market in Bangui, Central African Republic.

The Economist's video explains that while insects might not seem too palatable to some people, they're really good for you. Plus, they're a much more sustainable protein source compared to other kinds of meat.

So what say you? Would you add crickets or mealworms to your daily diet? Watch the video above and tell us in the comments.

[Roland Jacopetti]

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Forget The Hamburger; Insects Are Better For You And The Planet

Oh, dear! I...um...er....maybe. The legs and the wings would make it difficult. Maybe if they were made into some kind of pate'...(gulp)...or maybe not. Possibly a stir fry...(gulp, gulp)...or maybe not. Anyway, I'm definitely not going to be alive in 2015!

[jbox]

Let us know how they taste, Edward, but I gotta tellya I have my doubts...

[Valley Oak]

Thank you for your feedback, Roland. I always appreciate your view on things. Although I have to admit that I feel a little concerned when you say, "I'm definitely not going to be alive in 2015!"

Oh, dear! I...um...er....maybe. The legs and the wings would make it difficult. Maybe if they were made into some kind of pate'...(gulp)...or maybe not. Possibly a stir fry...(gulp, gulp)...or maybe not. Anyway, I'm definitely not going to be alive in 2015!

I would, if I ever got the chance. I don't know where, anywhere in the Greater San Francisco Bay Area that I could go to have a Chinese style plate of fried grasshoppers. I would run over there as quickly as possible to put those yummy things in my mouth and start munching and swallowing. Chinatown, maybe?

I understand the squeamish factor too; I'm not impervious to grossness. But I figure that it is more of an educational and experiential dynamic than anything else. I'm confident that once you sink your teeth into a mouthful of traditionally prepared insects, you will probably start singing a different tune with delectable pleasure.

[BobHeisler]

NO!!! Not for the planet, not for health, not for saving money. I draw the line at the insect world.

[Valley Oak]

Bob, you are an entomophobic!!! I'm never telling my creepy, crawling critter friends bedtime stories that have the name 'Bob' in them anymore!

(sniffle, sniffle...)

NO!!! Not for the planet, not for health, not for saving money. I draw the line at the insect world.

[podfish]

I would, if I ever got the chance. I don't know where, anywhere in the Greater San Francisco Bay Area that I could go to have a Chinese style plate of fried grasshoppers.

Mexican food does it too: Karina's Mexican Bakery in Petaluma has chapulines, and I was at a restaurant somewhere that had escamoles. Unfortunately I can't recall where it was.. but I bet you can find them in the bay area.

[DedeJeumJeum]

Sure, I would eat insects! Why not!

I already eat a few exoskeletal creatures: shrimp & lobster & crayfish & escargot. And even though most of them live in water, they are not mammals, birds, or lizards.

This question always surprises me because we eat what we were exposed to eating at a young age. Most people will eat new-to-them fruits and vegetables with some hesitation. But new-to-them meats... now that's another story. Whoa!
When I offered a hungry homeless fellow my leftover curry rice and goat he was horrified. I asked if he was a vegetarian, and he was not. Instead he opted for a can of beans from my bag of give-away foods (& other items like toothbrushes and paste) that I keep in the front seat area of my car.

Some people will try an insect when paired with one or two other familiar items. Cream cheese on a cracker, with crunchy grasshoppers is an easy place to start.

Entomologists, working with chefs, are feeding insects things like parsley, garlic, lemon, and other things that cleanse the gut and pre-season the insects, much the way the common brown snail is fed cornmeal to cleanse their gut, (and then we call them escargot!)

Grind them into a paste, make a soup, a curry, a sandwich spread, a salad dressing. Seems like a GREAT idea to me!! Crisp them up and make croutons, or nutty sprinkles, or just snacks! (Not that long ago no one is the USA ate seaweed, and now it is everywhere as a simple snack!)

Some worms taste like cucumbers... yumm!

I suppose some vegans or other creature-sensitive souls might be adverse to eating another walking creature, but that is another issue...YES TO INSECTS!

[podfish]

Sure, I would eat insects! Why not!
I already eat a few exoskeletal creatures: shrimp & lobster & crayfish & escargot.

and of course we DO all eat bugs. They're in the food; I forget the allowable percentage of insect parts per oz of peanut butter, but frankly I don't want to remember. I do like peanut butter, and I'm too squeamish to eat bugs on purpose. But like in politics, realism trumps idealism.

[rossmen]

i eat insects every chance i get! the two best dishes, garlic fried mealworms, and fresh bee brood. i don't generally eat my bee brood but sometimes they have to go and why waste something so delicious. the dish i have been contemplating for about ten years is earwig soup, or maybe bread.

earwigs are everywhere and if i know how to make them palatable it will help with my worry about possible socioeconomic collapse and sudden global heating due too drastic reduction of stratospheric particulate pollution. i figure roasting and grinding into a high protein powder, you could make something out of them. insects with exoskeletons i have found to be less appetizing. i didn't like crickets even coated in caramel or chocolate :(>

[DedeJeumJeum]

Hmmm, grasshoppers and ant larvae.. OK!

I recall an episode of Bizarre Foods w/Andrew Z, , , he goes to a French(?) snail farm.. and they don't harvest the snails, but the larvae.. washed, sorted, etc....and he is shocked by all the delicate textures and wondrous flavors of this new snail caviar... he was so enraptured by the taste that he created a desire in me to try them, and one day I will.

Mexican food does it too: Karina's Mexican Bakery in Petaluma has chapulines, and I was at a restaurant somewhere that had escamoles. Unfortunately I can't recall where it was.. but I bet you can find them in the bay area.

[meherc]

NO. To hell with the planet, health and I have no money to save. I would pay for the wormy things with food stamps. I will try a lot of things once. This falls into that category.

[Valley Oak]

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The following article was published by TED Talks:

Should we eat bugs? - Emma Bryce

What's tasty, abundant and high in protein? Bugs! Although less common outside the tropics, entomophagy, the practice of eating bugs, was once extremely widespread throughout cultures. You may feel icky about munching on insects, but they feed about 2 billion people each day (Mmm, fried tarantulas). They also hold promise for food security and the environment. Emma Bryce makes a compelling case for dining on bugs.

[jbox]

The discussion about eating insects is just one more step toward the utopia envisioned in "Soylent Green".

What we really need to do is control the world's population, but that begins and ends with individual decision making, evidently too much to ask. So now the world has what, 7 billion people, maybe 8 billion?

When I was growing up the population was 3 billion. How long can we keep this up and what is to become of us? I dunno, let the next generation worry about it.

Fried tarantulas, anyone?

[phooph]

The FDA allows for a percentage of bugs in various foods so we are already eating them without being aware. Since they are more nutritious and safer than other animal based foods, I think this will gradually become more common. You can already purchase high protein bars and brownies made with cricket flour. The list of cricket flour recipes continues to grow on the internet. https://www.cricketflours.com/cricke...rownie-recipe/

[Valley Oak]

Here is another fascinating video from TED Talks on eating insects as a delicacy!
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Why not eat insects?

Dutch entomologist, Marcel Dicke, makes an appetizing case for adding insects to everyone's diet. His message to squeamish chefs and foodies: delicacies like locusts and caterpillars compete with meat in flavor, nutrition and eco-friendliness. Dicke wants us to reconsider our relationship with insects, promoting bugs as a tasty — and ecologically sound — alternative to meat in an increasingly hungry world.

Click on the link below to see this Dutch scientist's fascinating video:
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[Valley Oak]

This article was published by the BBC website on 14.10.14



Could insects be the wonder food of the future?

Billions more hungry mouths are going to put more strain on the planet’s resources. Can eating creepy crawlies offer a solution? Emily Anthes reports.

At first my meal seems familiar, like countless other dishes I’ve eaten at Asian restaurants. A swirl of noodl*es slicked with oil and studded with shredded chicken, the aroma of ginger and garlic, a few wilting chives placed on the plate as a final flourish. And then, I notice the eyes. Dark, compound orbs on a yellow speckled head, joined to a winged, segmented body. I hadn’t spotted them right away, but suddenly I see them everywhere – my noodles are teeming with insects.

I can’t say I wasn’t warned. On this warm May afternoon, I’ve agreed to be a guinea pig at an experimental insect tasting in Wageningen, a university town in the central Netherlands. My hosts are Ben Reade and Josh Evans from the Nordic Food Lab, a non-profit culinary research institute. Reade and Evans lead the lab’s ‘insect deliciousness’ project, a three-year effort to turn insects – the creepy crawlies that most of us squash without a second thought – into tasty treats.

The project began after René Redzepi (the chef and co-owner of Noma, the Danish restaurant often ranked the best in the world) tasted an Amazonian ant that reminded him of lemongrass. Redzepi, who founded the Nordic Food Lab in 2008, became interested in serving insects at Noma and asked the researchers at the lab to explore the possibilities.

Read more: click here

[forveterans49]

I won't be eating this stuff...:(

This article was published by the BBC website on 14.10.14



Could insects be the wonder food of the future?

...Read more: click here

[Valley Oak]

The movie, "Soylent Green," is an excellent science fiction movie, btw, starring C. Heston. Soylent Green is not a "utopian" story, which implies a perfect society. Soylent Green is a dystopian view of the future, the exact opposite of utopia.

Soylent Green is essentially about our future society descending into cannibalism because there is not nearly enough food to feed the many billions of people alive in the world. Whenever someone dies, their body is immediately processed into the little green pellets and then distributed as quickly as possible to the hungry masses. A disturbing but entertaining film, which I saw when I was a child and when it was released back in the 60s or 70s. We saw it at a drive-in theater, with the large, heavy metal speaker hanging from one of the car windows.

So, my question to you, John, is if you feel that eating insects, just like billions of people around the world already do and have been doing for thousands of years, will inevitably lead all of Western Civilization to the mass-scale cannibalism portrayed in the science fiction classic, Soylent Green?

The discussion about eating insects is just one more step toward the utopia envisioned in "Soylent Green".

What we really need to do is control the world's population, but that begins and ends with individual decision making, evidently too much to ask. So now the world has what, 7 billion people, maybe 8 billion?

When I was growing up the population was 3 billion. How long can we keep this up and what is to become of us? I dunno, let the next generation worry about it.

Fried tarantulas, anyone?

[jbox]

The movie, "Soylent Green," is an excellent science fiction movie, btw, starring C. Heston. Soylent Green is not a "utopian" story, which implies a perfect society. Soylent Green is a dystopian view of the future, the exact opposite of utopia...

Hi Edward,

My "utopia" comment was tinged with just a bit of irony.

My real point was that we, as a species, are increasing our population at an unsustainable rate and that there is no end in sight. Doubling the population of the earth every 50 years is a ridiculous notion. Furthermore, we as a species on the earth are akin to a virus living on a host. The earth cannot continue to sustain us at this rate and we are already seeing the effects in terms of changing environment and weather. Our natural ecosystems are going further out of balance every day. The real question is should we find more ways to support the increasing population by clear cutting forests in favor of farmland, increasing food production efficiency through better GMO crops and pesticides, and find and develop more alternative food sources like insects or should we be finding ways to limit the population? For me there is only one answer.

[podfish]

My real point was that we, as a species, are increasing our population at an unsustainable rate and that there is no end in sight. Doubling the population of the earth every 50 years is a ridiculous notion.

that's been said before. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Robert_Malthus.
and it's just as true now as it was 200 years ago; it probably will still be true in another 200 years.

Furthermore, we as a species on the earth are akin to a virus living on a host. The earth cannot continue to sustain us at this rate and we are already seeing the effects in terms of changing environment and weather. Our natural ecosystems are going further out of balance every day.

virii aren't alive, either. So not so akin. Our natural systems are changing every day, they're never in balance.

the problem I have with these analogies is that they start the discussion off with false premises, and lead to random and incorrect solutions. We want to keep the world livable for us, and feed people so they're not starving in the streets. There are many who don't want to see a huge human population for a variety of reasons, and others who see God's Plan (tm) as filling the world with mankind. Eating bugs comes into it, as does a desire to see the natural systems change at a slower rate, but the in the long run the world doesn't care and in the short run your premise about the need to limit population isn't universally held.

[Valley Oak]

If we are going to talk about human population growth and food supply, then we must also talk about sustainability, climate change, and an overall environmentalist/ecological and permaculture approach to solve this huge problem. It is a manifold issue or an issue made up of several issues. You could say, as has already been alluded to in this discussion, that there are also important cultural, religious, economic, and political layers to this mix. The religious angle is an obvious one and the anti-choice groups in the abortion battles will probably fall on the side of NO population control. Who knows.

This is a complex global problem because the solution requires international cooperation, but many countries don't want to play along, especially the United States with our climate change denialists and their politicians who endorse this delusion in order to get elected. We need to address the UN Assembly with this challenge and propose a varied-pronged strategy. Yes, we must attempt, as much as possible, to limit population growth, an endeavor in which the Chinese now have plenty of experience. But the fact that it is precisely the Commie, godless Chinese who try to control their burgeoning population of one billion, three hundred million or so (4 times the American pop.) provides ammunition for heated opposition from those interest groups (religious and conservative), which are already against any stabilizing or reduction of American population. "Be fruitful and multiply."

Theoretically, you could argue that there is even a business interest in continued population growth so that there is a large workforce that will drive down wages and help prop up the economy; this necessitates a high unemployment rate. And you will get that if there are far fewer jobs available than there are people.

Militarily, if we continue to have the 3rd largest population in the world, then we will always have enough soldiers to fight any war we want, including a 3rd world war. The unemployed won't have anywhere else to go so they will join one of the US Armed Forces just to get a small paycheck in.

Thomas Malthus was an asshole. I would not give too much credence to what that 'man of the cloth' had to say. He had no compassion, which is typical of most religious people. The earth has enough resources to feed everyone in the world today! But because of the economic system (capitalism and imperialism) the food production and distribution is a nightmare of a mess. Wealthy countries like the US and France lavishly subsidize their agricultural sectors. One of the many consequences of this is that when an American, French, etc. farmer sell their artificially cheap foodstuffs in international markets, 3rd world countries cannot compete. Third world farmers do not get govt subsidies because their governments are too poor to do so. When 3rd world farmers sell their food, they are asking the REAL price for that food they produced. But they cannot survive because very few people, entities, or nations will buy their more expensive foods. They go broke, starve, their farms close, and some commit suicide in public.

We need to limit the human population to perhaps only 2 billion people so that we have a sustainable symbiotic relationship with our planet, which we have scoured and destroyed, some say to a point of no return. So we have to act fast.

Part of the solution is to significantly reduce meat in our diets and in our current system of food production, which is overly animal protein intensive. We can replace most of the animal protein with other sources, such as soy, quinoa, insects, etc, which are sustainable and work with nature instead of against it, and using permaculture principles. Our current practices of producing meat with cows, chickens, pigs, lambs, etc, is fantastically outperformed by the production of insects for food. Furthermore, not only are insects sustainable, but they will actually play a vital role in healing the earth directly.

As for cannibalism, I don't see that happening anytime soon. But if someday civilization collapses economically and spirals into new international wars and civil wars then, yes, we will see cannibalism. It is best for us to take matters up right now before it's too late. We have time now but not for long. Insects are a part of the recipe for success (pun intended) but it can only be part of the answer we need.

Below is a Pulitzer Prize winning photo of a human child starving to death with a vulture close behind, waiting in silence for its next meal. I guess it's okay for worms and vultures to eat humans.

[DedeJeumJeum]

"Be fruitful and multiply."

I recall years ago that a group of scholars and linguists got together and reread and rethought those words, and came up with something quite wonderful.... "Go forth and be creative".... That is a concept we can all get behind! Not make babies, not be fruitflies (ok, I jest), but our 'task' is to add wonderful things to this amazing planet that has created us.

As to cannibalism and bugs... wtf? ....as food, these are two ENTIRELY different things! LOL!

[LindaAnn]

I am trying to learn how to grow black soldier fly grubs for my chickens. Can anyone help me? I have been looking for someone who is growing them in Sonoma County, California. Thanks for any information anyone might have.

Could insects be the wonder food of the future?

[Valley Oak]

Below are only 11 links plus a video on Black Soldier Flies (BSF). There are many more references available for free on the Internet. Hope this helps.

1. Black Soldier Fly Blog

2. Hermetia illucens

3. Black Soldier Fly Farming

4. North Carolina State University - BSF

5. Future Food Waste Diversion & Recycling - BSF

6. Biopod - BSF

7. Tree Hugger - BSF

8. Bio Conversion of Food Waste

9. National Public Radio

10. Black Soldier Fly, White Magic

11. How We Make Compost In 3 Days

I am trying to learn how to grow black soldier fly grubs for my chickens. Can anyone help me? I have been looking for someone who is growing them in Sonoma County, California. Thanks for any information anyone might have.

[rossmen]

stabilizing human population happens when women have economic and healthcare access. this has already happened in the us, the current birthrate is below replacement, population growth here is driven by immigration. it has happened in other countries too, even more so, such as russia and japan, and is happening in many others, such as mexico and india. the exceptions are places where women continue to be culturally and legally held as reproductive slaves. the demographic prediction for this time used to be 9 billion, that is currently the most common top out guess, down from 12. easily fed, especially with more insect food, i am really excited about bsfl!