We all know that this idea is not
going to sell well but the fact it that we have not really tackled the
possibilities at all. After all, simple
maggots growing on good food produce a good tasting product. So insect husbandry will turn out to be a
piece of cake compared to everything else we have domesticated.
What needs to be done is to
explore the multiple species to locate optimal characteristics first, instead
of long after an industry is established.
I have already suggested that human waste processing through a maggot
culture that captures the maggots upon emergence may be very practical. These
can then be cleaned up and made into a high quality chicken feed.
The important idea is to master
the art and adapt it into our animal food chain to produce a high quality end
product. Chicken, fish and swine feed
are all excellent beginnings. None of
these need any special insect upgrades to make suitable for human consumption.
I think that while we do have
folks eating insects per se it will never be easy to popularize unless we can
produce a shrimp like meat product which should not be too hard. We will have to give it a strange name to
make selling easier.
The natural efficiencies of an
insect culture will provide an economic advantage that will tell in time. Recall that the present hugely expanded fish
supply is now fifty percent produced by aquaculture already and that was done
in the past forty years. The next forty
years will bring it up to over ninety percent and the unit cost will continue to
decline.
There is a natural limit to how
much beef we can produce, although it is far higher than anyone can imagine,
but as our capacity to water the arid zones and do other climate modification,
the cow will naturally need to be used more sparingly, yet more persuasively. I include other ruminants and ungulates in
that mix as a key secondary role is to process the natural environment.
Insect protein can be produced in
orders of magnitude greater amounts than animal protein and can easily become
important as needed. We are just a long
way from any need except as novelty.
New Idea to Reduce Global Warming: Everyone Eat Insects
by Wynne Parry, LiveScience
Senior Writer
Date: 18 February 2011
A delicious bug meal, another way to reduce your carbon footprint.
Hans Smid / bugsinthepicture.com
There is a rational, even persuasive, argument for voluntarily eating
insects: Bugs are high in protein, require less space to grow and offer a more
environmentally friendly alternative to the vertebrates we Westerners prefer,
advocates of the bug fare say.
However, this topic is not a hotbed of research, so while some data
exist — in particular on the protein content of insects — there are some
assumptions built into the latter part of this argument.
"The suggestion that insects would be more efficient has been
around for quite some time," said Dennis Oonincx, an entomologist at Wageningen University
in the Netherlands
The results, Oonincx said, "really are quite hopeful."
Untapped potential
For much of the world, eating insects — officially called entomophagy —
is neither strange nor disgusting nor exotic. In southern Africa ,
Mopani worms — the caterpillars of Emperor moths — are popular snacks. The
Japanese have enjoyed aquatic insect larvae since ancient times, and
chapulines, otherwise known as grasshoppers, are eaten in Mexico United States
Insects' nutritional content, small size and fast reproduction rates
have also made them appealing solutions to problems traditional agriculture
can't solve. For instance, a task force affiliated with the Japanese space
agency has looked to insects like silkworms and termites as a self-replenishing
supply of fats and amino acids for astronauts on
extended missions.
For children from 6 months to 3 years of age, low calories and low
protein are the main causes of death, about 5 million a year, according to
Frank Franklin, a professor and director of pediatric nutrition at the University of Alabama
at Birmingham
"The more I looked at it, the more it made incredible sense that
this would be an important nutritional advance that is only going to bring back
what has probably been there since the primitive man," he told LiveScience.
The comparison
A 2006 report by the U.N.'s Food and Agriculture Organization blamed
the livestock sector for a sizable portion of humans' greenhouse gas emissions
– 9 percent of
our carbon dioxide emissions (much of this originates in changes in
land use), 37 percent of our methane and 65 percent of our nitrous oxide
emissions.
Oonincx and his colleagues used two important livestock animals, pigs
and cattle, and compared existing data on their emissions of these greenhouse
gases, plus ammonia, with data they collected from five species of insects:
mealworms, house crickets, migratory locusts, sun beetles and Argentine
cockroaches. The latter two species are not considered edible, at least not
directly. Their taste is just not good, Oonincx said, however, protein
extracted from them could be added to foods.
To quantify the animals' greenhouse gas footprints, the team measured
the five insects' growth rates and their production of the greenhouse gases and
ammonia — also a pollutant but not a greenhouse gas. They compared these to
data already available on the cattle and pigs' growth rate and the rates at
which they emitted the same pollutants.
Cattle produced the least carbon dioxide per unit of body mass.
However, the picture changed once growth rate was considered. The data
indicated that insects grow more rapidly, and they emit less carbon dioxide per
unit of weight gained than do cattle and pigs. The cockroach was the clear
winner in this latter category; meanwhile, cattle produced the most carbon
dioxide per pound (or kilogram) gained. [The Truth about
Cockroaches]
The insects generally produced less methane, nitrous oxide and ammonia
both per unit of body mass and per unit of mass gained than pigs or
cattle.
"It proves the hypothesis that insects can be a more efficient
source [of protein], and I definitely believe there is a future for edible
insects," Oonincx said. "It may not be as the animal as such but
regarding protein extraction there is a lot to be learned and a lot to be
gained."
Solving the livestock problem
There are strategies that can reduce greenhouse gas emissions associated
with raising livestock but these improvements can't bring about reductions
necessary to meet emissions targets intended to
curb global warming, write the authors of a paper published in the medical
journal the Lancet in November 2009.
Their solution: a 30 percent reduction in livestock production, and
therefore, a drop in meat consumption. This would mean diets with less
saturated fat and fewer premature deaths caused by heart
disease, they write. (The researchers note that not everyone needs to
reduce meat consumption; agriculture produces enough fat, protein and other
nutrients to feed all of us, but food isn't distributed equally, resulting in
malnutrition and starvation in some places.)
A policy that reduces our hamburgers and barbeque is likely to
encounter resistance, one of the authors, Alan Dangour, of the London School
"It is clearly worthwhile investigating alternative sources of
high-quality protein," Dangourwrote. "However, the practical barriers
to eating insects (in Westernized societies) are extremely large and perhaps
currently even likely to be insurmountable."
David Gracer, an American advocate for entomophagy who co-organized a
conference on the subject in December, welcomed the findings.
"It is wonderful to see science showing the world that what is
instinctively apparent is actually factually correct," Gracer said.
"The point is that most scientists in Western nations are too busy
ignoring this subject to go ahead and take it seriously, and as soon as people
do so, the experiments simply reinforce what we already assumed was true."
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