Why eating insects is good for the
environment
From: Ben Whitford, Ecologist,
in ENN.com. More from this Affiliate
The other day, at a busy
restaurant in the middle of Washington, D.C, I had bugs for lunch. Sitting at a
polished table in Oyamel - a high-end Mexican eatery a stone's throw from the
Capitol - I was presented with the house specialty: a fresh corn tortilla
cradling a fist-sized heap of glistening chapulines, the roasted grasshoppers
prized as a delicacy in the Oaxaca region of Mexico.
Reader, I ate them. The
carapaces were disconcertingly crunchy, but the taste was subtle - mostly
chipotle chilli and lime, with a pleasant nuttiness from the grasshoppers
themselves. Later, after picking the legs from my teeth, I chatted with Oyamel
head chef Colin King, who sells two or three dozen tacos de chapulines a day to
curious diners. Many guests first try them on a dare, King said, only to order
second and third helpings. "People generally end up liking the
flavour," he adds.
A growing number of
forward-thinking chefs are putting insects on their menus - often grasshoppers
and mealworms, but also more exotic fare such as creamy bee larvae or zesty
carpenter ants.
"It's amazing to me how it's snowballed," says David
George Gordon, author of The Eat-a-Bug Cookbook and one of America's top
edible-insect evangelists: "In the last five or six years there's been a
real trend ... when I give talks, and ask who in the audience has eaten insects
before, I'm amazed how many people raise their hands."
That's music to the ears
of Afton Halloran, a consultant with the U.N.'s Food and Agriculture
Organisation, (FAO), who co-authored a recent report suggesting that insect
consumption could help feed the planet's growing population. Insects are a
cheap, reliable protein source, Halloran explains, requiring a quarter as much
feed, pound-for-pound, as larger livestock.
Insects also need negligible space
and water, can eat waste that would otherwise be discarded, and are far less
flatulent than conventional livestock: one study found that pigs belch out up
to 100 times more greenhouse gases than insects per pound of meat produced.
Halloran knows that
insect-eating is a hard sell: while 2 billion people around the world regularly
eat insects, Westerners are typically disgusted by the idea of consuming bugs.
(That doesn't mean it doesn't happen: many processed foods are permitted to
contain a certain proportion of insect parts, and it's been estimated that the
average consumer unknowingly ingests more than half a kilogram of insects per
year.)
Still, Halloran is hopeful that culinary innovators like Oyamel's Chef
King will pave the way for the broader acceptance of insect consumption, and
eventually the full-scale commercial development of insect-based foods.
Read more at The Ecologist.
Insect food image via
Shutterstock.
