We need a sustainable option for feeding nearly 10 billion people. Creepy-crawlies could be the way.
By Jessica KarlMarch 5, 2024 at 10:43 PM UTC
Just not like this. Source: Canva
A Bug’s Lifehttps://archive.ph/o/bqukb/https://twitter.com/AGoldmund/status/1765013873948598610
Picture this: It’s the year 2093. Your great, great grandaughter is hosting a dinner party for her friends tonight in honor of the total solar eclipse. She starts on the bug board, taking care to assemble the tinned locusts. The hot honey hornets are next. After that, it’s the scorpion kimchi and the ant guacamole. Then she takes the baked casu martzu — a Sardinian cheese that contains live insect larvae — out of the oven and tops it with faux caviar. Wanting to keep dessert simple, she drone-ordered some Micolino’s ice cream. Guests can top it with cricket sprinkles if they want.
If this future sounds far-fetched to you, fine. But it’s 2024, and we’ve already bulldozed our way through cheese plates, butter boards and hummus spreads. In 70 years, who’s to say we won’t have cockroach charcuterie?
Italy’s deputy prime minister hopes he doesn’t live to see the day. “STOP insect flour-based foods in school canteens,” Matteo Salvini tweeted last month. But David Fickling says insect farming ought not to scare us so much. “Insects are highly efficient at converting waste matter into high-quality protein, making their consumption a potentially more sustainable way to feed a planet approaching 10 billion people,” he writes.
You’re not alone if that skeeves you out. “Whether it’s the grubs farmed by Dave Bautista in Blade Runner: 2049 or Charlton Heston in Soylent Green yelling that food is being made from ‘people,’ there are few things that provoke as visceral a reaction as the prospect that ecological disaster might force you to eat something gross,” he writes.
Just last year there was a dystopian conspiracy theory about governments forcing enslaved people to eat bugs. But these scary narratives couldn’t be further from the truth: “They're fine for snacking, but insect protein has its greatest potential as nutrient rich, climate-friendly livestock feed,” as Amanda Little has previously explained. By making animal food out of fly larvae and mealworms, poultry and livestock meat should become much more affordable for human consumption. Read the whole thing.
Bonus Ecological Disaster Reading: A hotter and more chaotic atmosphere is making it harder to build nuclear weapons and store waste safely. — Mark Gongloff
Source (Archive)
