Lovely Grub: Are Insects the Future of Food?
Over the next three days, they will lay out their vision for the future. It is ambitious and optimistic. They will speculate about creating an insect aisle at supermarkets and fast-food restaurants serving bug burgers. They will imagine putting packages of ‘beautiful, clean’ shrink-wrapped mealworms on display at the meat counter alongside the skirt steak and chicken wings. And they will dream about a world in which forests are thick, the land is fertile, the climate is stable, water is clean, waste is minimal, food prices are low, and hunger and malnutrition are rare.
This conference, they hope, will be the beginning of it all. The experts assembled in the darkened auditorium are fired up, ready to give the world the gift of six-legged livestock. Are we ready to receive it?
Turning to insects for nourishment is not a novel idea – the Bible mentions entomophagy, as do texts from Ancient Greece and Rome. But insect eating never became common in Modern Europe. The reasons are unknown, but the spread of agriculture – and, in particular, the domestication of livestock – may have made insects, and undomesticated plants and animals in general, less important as food sources. The advent of agriculture may have also contributed to a view that insects were primarily pests and that insect eating was primitive. What’s more, Europe’s temperate climate makes wild harvesting less practical than in the tropics, where insect populations are larger and more predictable.
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Boosting wild insect populations
Nevertheless, entomophagy remains common in some parts of the world: at least 2 billion people worldwide eat insects, according to the FAO. Yellow jacket wasp larvae are popular in Japan, cicadas are treasured in Malawi, and weaver ants are devoured in Thailand. Termites, a food favorite in many African nations, can be fried, smoked, steamed, sun-dried or ground into a powder. The list of edible insect species is at 1,900 and growing.