“Eating bugs is a great idea!” shout future-minded gourmets, the kinds of people who eat waxworm tacos willingly and feed bug cookies to their coworkers. But are insects like crickets and grasshoppers really the solution to our environmental and food-security woes? Well… maybe not. Not entirely, at least.
https://gizmodo.com/i-ate-fried-caterpillars-and-so-can-you-512202482
https://gizmodo.com/bug-eating-is-a-great-idea-and-we-should-all-be-doing-m-1494525087
https://gizmodo.com/should-you-really-start-eating-insects-509900937
At Real Future, Alexis Madrigal reports on recent findings that suggest bugs like “crickets—delicious and efficient though they may be—are not magical creatures, who can simply be swapped into our existing food infrastructure to fix the world’s problems”:
…the Cricket Theory of Food Futures might rest on rather shaky ground, according to a new study in the scientific journal PLoS One. When University of California, Davis researchers Mark Lundy and Michael Parrella tested crickets under different feed and rearing conditions, they found that the massive efficiency (and therefore sustainability) crickets are supposed to deliver didn’t quite materialize.
“Compared to the industrial-scale production of chickens, crickets fed a poultry feed diet showed little improvement in protein conversion efficiency, a key metric in determining the ecological footprint of grain-based livestock protein,” write Lundy and Parrella.
So how do you leverage cricket protein most effectively? Lundy and Parrella have some ideas, and Madrigal has some key observations of his own.
Photo Credit: louis r via flickr | CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
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