Lovely Grub: Are Insects the Future of Food?
Rather than carting crates of escamoles to Copenhagen, Evans and Reade hope to identify European insects that are similar to the ones they tasted on their travels or can be prepared in similar ways. (One pro tip they picked up from a farmer in southwestern Uganda: crickets should rest for a few minutes after being cooked.) They say the goal isn’t necessarily to get everyone to eat insects. Rather, it’s to introduce diners to delicious, under-used ingredients, expand food choices and encourage people to embrace the edible resources surrounding them.
They sometimes seem frustrated by what they hear at the conference, by all the talk of growing insect production, using insects in highly processed products, and creating a global insect trade, with a few easy-to-farm species shipped all around the world. They object to large-scale insect farming partly on gastronomic grounds – in their experience, farmed, freeze-dried insects taste “like cardboard,” Evans says – but also on ecological ones, worrying that we may end up merely replacing one industrial protein-production system with another.
“Insects themselves could be the most sustainable thing. They could have no carbon footprint at all,” Reade says. “But then if we insisted on freeze-drying them all using huge amounts of energy and sending them halfway across the planet for energy-consuming protein extraction and then decided to sell that protein in another part of the world shaped like chicken breasts in a little plastic packet – well, there’s nothing sustainable about that at all.”
Indeed, just because insects have a killer feed-to-food conversion ratio doesn’t mean that anything we do with or to insects will be eco-friendly. Bart Muys, an ecologist at KU Leuven in Belgium, tells the conference-goers that although insects can be reared on relatively tiny plots of land, producing insect meal requires significantly more energy than fishmeal or soy meal does, largely because the bugs need to be raised in warm conditions. The environmental impact of each production system will vary, depending on countless factors, including location, species, and feedstock. The golden rule, Muys warns, is “Do not claim before you know.”