Equilibrium/Sustainability — Feeding The Future On Silkworms And Crickets

Future food shortages could be alleviated by encouraging the culinary use of edible insects, researchers argue in a new paper.

Threats to food security from climate change and extreme weather can’t be met with expanded traditional livestock production, two researchers wrote in a Science “Perspectives” piece on Thursday.

Insects can produce animal protein and other nutrients necessary to humans far faster and on less land than traditional agriculture, wrote co-authors Arup Kumar Hazarika and Unmilan Kalita, of India’s Cotton University and Barnagar College.

These invertebrates also provide equivalent environmental benefits to lab-grown meat — but greatly reduced supply chain costs, the authors added.

Meanwhile, insects have far more efficient feed-conversion ratios than birds and mammals — enabling them to turn more of the vegetable nutrition they consume into usable biomass.

While more than 2,000 species of insects are edible and insects are widely consumed in Africa, Asia and Latin America, a significant “yuck” factor stands in the way of their introduction in North America, Hazarika and Kalita noted.

But those who are willing to eat crickets and moths have access to a nutritional cornucopia inaccessible to pure vegetarians, the authors wrote.

Dried house crickets are nearly two-thirds protein — beating out dried soybeans by nearly 50 percent, they noted. 

And yellow mealworms and the larvae of domestic silk moths and certain species of emperor moths “contain more protein by mass than does poultry or beef,” the authors added.

Publication: Arup Kumar Hazarika, et al., Human Consumption Of Insects, Science (2022). DOI: 10.1126/science.abp8819

Original Story Source: Massachusetts Institute of Technology