food Your bug-eating future.

[Ice_Blue]

If humans want to avoid the threat of a global famine, then they need to eat more bugs.

This stomach-churning conclusion may sound far-fetched, but it's actually the result of United Nations research into feeding the world in the coming decades.

In January, the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), along with experts from Holland's Wageningen University, put together an action plan of sorts to introduce the idea of eating insects to Europe and the U.S.

And while entomphagy (bug munching) may sound bizarre to Western ears, for over 80 percent of the world's population, the idea of eating fried ant larvae is as normal as chowing on beef jerky.

"By 2020, you will be buying insects in supermarkets," Professor Marcel Dicke, a Wageningen University expert in insect cultivation and eating, told Wired last year. "We will be amazed that in 2011 people didn't think it was going to happen. We have already seen the introduction of eggplants, sushi, things people never ate here."

Indeed, go back 200 years and Americans, according to the Arizona Star, saw lobster as useful for one thing, fertilizer. This bottom-feeding crustacean was reserved for the very poorest in society, with some areas even legislating against giving it to prisoners more than once a week as it constituted "cruel and unusual punishment."

However, changing attitudes aside, the simple truth is that bugs and their excretions are already in your food.

Ever had a red-flavored yogurt, juice drink or ice cream? Then you've almost certainly been consuming the juice of the female cochineal insect.

The coloring agent carmine, a widely used food dye, is actually an acid extracted from the cochineal and its eggs. These little critters are found on prickly pear cactus plants located primarily in South America and Europe, with the acid extracted, collected and pasteurized to rid the carmine of harmful microorganisms such as salmonella.

But why bother introducing "mini-livestock" into the Western diet in the first place?

For starters, the amount of beef, pork, chicken and other conventional meats consumed is, by most estimates, unsustainable. We simply don't have the land or the resources to raise enough livestock to feed the roughly 2.5 billion extra mouths set to inhabit the planet by 2050.

For instance, it takes roughly ten grams of feed to produce one gram of beef and three grams of pork. The same amount will produce nine grams of edible insect meat, according to Wageningen University's researchers.

Insects are also a vastly more efficient source of protein and other essentials. According to the FAO, "For every 100 grams of dried caterpillars, there are about 53 grams of protein, about 15 percent of fat and about 17 percent of carbohydrates."

"The insects are also believed to have a higher proportion of protein and fat than beef and fish with a high energy value."

Details:

http://www.ibtimes.c...tomphagy-eu.htm

[+Warwagon MVC]

[DocM]

Been there, done that. My uncle was a Navy UDT (pre-SEAL) & Dad was Army Air Force, and they taught all the cousins how to survive on ants, grubs, snakes, lizard, muskrat and whatever else we could catch, dig, trap or swat. I'll never forget my mother chowing on "raisinets" at his house only to find thety were chocolate coverd ants. That didn't end well :rofl:

[+E.Worm Jimmy Subscriber¹]

yummy

crunchy grasshoper is poplular i heard.

[DocM]

Not too bad - cook 'em in olive oil and serve with guacamole. You can buy them pre-cooked in Texas and Mexico.

[THolman Veteran]

You can bet I'll starve first.