Eat insects? Sounds yucky. Sprinkle a few sautéed mealworms over your roasted potatoes? That sounds a little better perhaps, but eating bugs and worms is not soon likely to become mainstream in our culture. It’s hard to get past the fact that you’re dining on creepy-crawlies.
And yet eating insects is no worse than eating any other creature. In fact, eating bugs makes more sense than eating beef. It takes 10 kilograms of feed to produce one kilogram of beef, but just 1.7 kilograms of feed to produce a kilogram of crickets. A cricket is 70 per cent protein, while the protein content in beef ranges from 17 to 40 per cent, depending on the cut and how it is prepared.
Yasman Akhtar, a research associate with the University of B.C.’s faculty of land and food systems, says insects are rich in protein, vitamins, calcium and magnesium.
“And they have less calories than beef,” she says. “The other advantage is they can be harvested with very few resources and don’t need a lot of water or space.”
And they don’t give off greenhouse gases, while livestock accounts for about eight per cent of methane emissions.
Advocates of eating insects foresee bugs as a source of protein for a planet of growing population and diminishing resources. But it’s not as simple as going out on the lawn and gathering up a few grasshoppers for supper. You might think we have a lot of insects on Vancouver Island, but the natural environment here wouldn’t supply insects in sufficient quantity and concentrations to be practical — you would expend more energy catching your supper than it would provide. So that means raising bugs in captivity.
Still, we’re a long way from arguments about the comparative merits of free-range and farm-raised crickets. In certain Asian countries, where insects have long been part of the diet, cricket farms are increasing in numbers. Only a handful of such farms exist in North America, and they are struggling, their owners hoping changing attitudes will bring market changes, so that demand will go up and prices can come down. Those chirps don’t come cheap.
Convincing people in our society to eat bugs is a challenge. Is it because insects look creepy? Checked out a shrimp’s looks lately? What’s the difference?
A crab won’t win any beauty contests, but people who will happily chomp on a crab leg will balk at crunching on crickets. But why? A crab crawls around on the ocean floor eating decaying animal matter; a cricket subsists mainly on living plants (except in times of famine when it eats its own kind).
But it’s not about scientific data or logic, it’s about traditions. It’s about what we’re used to, and change is difficult, especially when it comes to what we put in our mouths. And it is all so subjective.
“He was a bold man that first ate an oyster,” said Jonathan Swift. Admittedly, to someone who has never eaten an oyster, it can look unappetizing, but who’s to say what food should look like? The first people who ate oysters were probably less concerned about the appearance of their food and more concerned about survival. The oyster likely looked no less appetizing than other things they were eating.
In a meat-and-potatoes society, it’s a bold few who are eating crickets, mealworms, grasshoppers and cockroaches. They are pioneers of change, and more power to them. The more food choices we have, the better off we are.
I have sampled sautéed mealworms and roasted crickets, and found them to be tasty. Knowing they had been raised and prepared in sanitary conditions helped. Can’t always say that about other things I’ve eaten, such as hamburgers and hot dogs. (“Don’t put that in your mouth! You don’t know where it’s been!”)
We gag at the idea of eating small, six-legged creatures, yet have no trouble wolfing down a broad array of highly processed foods that are downright bad for us. It wouldn’t hurt us to set aside prejudices and consider other dietary options.
Still, it will be a long time before you hear: “Want mealworms with that?”
