Lovely Grub: Are Insects the Future of Food?
The next morning, Reade and Evans join 450 of the world’s foremost experts on entomophagy, or insect-eating, at a hotel down the road in Ede. They are here for Insects to Feed the World, a three-day conference to “promote the use of insects as human food and as animal feed in assuring food security”.
The attendees are all familiar with the same dire facts. By the year 2050, the planet will be packed with 9 billion people. In low- and middle-income countries, the demand for animal products is rising sharply as economies and incomes grow; in the next few decades, we’ll need to figure out how to produce enough protein for billions more mouths. Simply ramping up our current system is not really a solution. The global livestock industry already takes an enormous toll on the environment. It’s a hungry and thirsty beast, gobbling up land and water. It’s a potent polluter, thanks to the animal waste and veterinary medicines that seep into soil and water. And it emits more greenhouse gases than planes, trains and automobiles combined.
The insect authorities assembled in Ede believe that entomophagy could solve many of these problems. Insects are chock-full of protein and rich in essential micronutrients, such as iron and zinc. They don’t need as much space as livestock, emit lower levels of greenhouse gases, and have a sky-high feed conversion rate: a single kilogram of feed yields 12 times more edible cricket protein than beef protein. Some species of insects are drought resistant and may require less water than cows, pigs, or poultry.
Insect meals could also replace some of the expensive ingredients (e.g. soybeans and fishmeal) that are fed to farm animals, potentially lowering the cost of livestock products and freeing up feed crops for human consumption. As an added bonus, bugs can be raised on refuse, such as food scraps and animal manure, so insect farms could increase the world’s supply of protein while reducing and recycling waste.
Officials at the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) became interested in the role of insects in food security about a decade ago after documenting insects’ significant role in Central African diets. Since then, the FAO has been commissioning studies, issuing reports and arranging small meetings on eating insects. The gathering in Ede, jointly organized by the FAO and Wageningen University and Research Centre, is the culmination of all these efforts – the first major international conference to bring together entomologists, entrepreneurs, nutritionists, chefs, psychologists, and government officials. They are here to discuss how to expand the use of insects as food and feed, particularly in the Western world, and to lay the foundation for an edible insect industry – to review the science, identify the obstacles and talk about how to move forward.