Bugs à la carte?

By 3. Juli 2012Blog, Health, Nutrition

It’s a pending problem that has been spoken about often. How do we feed the increasing world population especially with the increase in demand for meat? Entomophagy, the eating of insects. Despite the yuck factor that you are probably feeling insects are already eaten in some cultures around the world and if some people have their way, insect protein will start appearing in many processed foods.

It has many advantages: the food conversion efficiency of insects, that is, the efficiency of turning ingested food into body substance is about 13 times that of traditional livestock. They also do not need to be fed grains which can instead be used for human consumption. But the question remains, would you knowingly eat bread or cakes with the addition of ground up mealworms, or be able to tuck into a locust stir-fry?

Tom Heap investigates in this edition of the BBC radio 4 podcast “Costing the earth”.