The Six-Legged Meat of the Future
Highlight and define at least five new terms
Ask at least three HIGH LEVEL questions
Make at least ten QUALITY comments
Do an internet search and cite at least two
other articles. Respond to each.
John S. Dykes
At the London restaurant Archipelago, diners can order the $11
Baby Bee Brulee: a creamy custard topped with a crunchy little
bee. In New York, the Mexican restaurant Toloache offers $11
chapulines tacos: two tacos stuffed with Oaxacan-style dried
grasshoppers.
Could beetles, dragonfly larvae and water bug caviar be the meat
of the future? As the global population booms and demand strains
the world's supply of meat, there's a growing need for alternate
animal proteins. Insects are high in protein, B vitamins and
minerals like iron and zinc, and they're low in fat. Insects are easier
to raise than livestock, and they produce less waste. Insects are
abundant. Of all the known animal species, 80% walk on six legs;
over 1,000 edible species have been identified. And the taste? It's
often described as "nutty."
Worms, crickets, dung beetles -- to most people they're just creepy
crawlers. To Brooklyn painter and art professor Marc Dennis,
they're yummy ingredients for his Bug Dinners.
The vast majority of the developing world already eats insects. In
Laos and Thailand, weaver-ant pupae are a highly prized and
nutritious delicacy. They are prepared with shallots, lettuce,
chilies, lime and spices and served with sticky rice. Further back in
history, the ancient Romans considered beetle larvae to be gourmet
fare, and the Old Testament mentions eating crickets and
grasshoppers. In the 20th century, the Japanese emperor Hirohito's
favorite meal was a mixture of cooked rice, canned wasps
(including larvae, pupae and adults), soy sauce and sugar.
Recipe: Crispy Crickets
Preheat the oven to 225 degrees. Strip the antennae, limbs and
wings (if any) from 20 to 30 clean, frozen adult crickets, or 40 to
60 cricket nymphs. Spread the stripped crickets on a lightly oiled
baking sheet and place in oven. Bake until crickets are crisp,
around 20 minutes. Yield: one cup.
Sprinkle these on salads or put them through a coffee grinder to
turn them into bug "flour." You could even combine the crickets
with Chex Mix for a protein-rich snack.
From "The Eat-a-Bug Cookbook" by David George Gordon (Ten
Speed Press)
More Recipes: Superworm Tempura
And: Where to Find Creepy Crawly Cuisine
Will Westerners ever take to insects as food? It's possible. We are
entomologists at Wageningen University, and we started
promoting insects as food in the Netherlands in the 1990s. Many
people laughed—and cringed—at first, but interest gradually
became more serious. In 2006 we created a "Wageningen—City of
Insects" science festival to promote the idea of eating bugs; it
attracted more than 20,000 visitors.
Over the past two years, three Dutch insect-raising companies,
which normally produce feed for animals in zoos, have set up
special production lines to raise locusts and mealworms for human
consumption. Now those insects are sold, freeze-dried, in two
dozen retail food outlets that cater to restaurants. A few restaurants
in the Netherlands have already placed insects on the menu, with
locusts and mealworms (beetle larvae) usually among the dishes.
Insects have a reputation for being dirty and carrying diseases—yet
less than 0.5% of all known insect species are harmful to people,
farm animals or crop plants. When raised under hygienic
conditions—eating bugs straight out of the backyard generally isn't
recommended—many insects are perfectly safe to eat.
Enlarge Image
Mitchell Fienberg
Meanwhile, our food needs are on the rise. The human population
is expected to grow from six billion in 2000 to nine billion in 2050.
Meat production is expected to double in the same period, as
demand grows from rising wealth. Pastures and fodder already use
up 70% of all agricultural land, so increasing livestock production
would require expanding agricultural acreage at the expense of rain
forests and other natural lands. Officials at the United Nations
Food and Agriculture Organization recently predicted that beef
could become an extreme luxury item by 2050, like caviar, due to
rising production costs.
Raising insects for food would avoid many of the problems
associated with livestock. For instance, swine and humans are
similar enough that they can share many diseases. Such coinfection can yield new disease strains that are lethal to humans, as
happened during a swine fever outbreak in the Netherlands in the
late 1990s. Because insects are so different from us, such risks are
accordingly lower.
Insects are also cold-blooded, so they don't need as much feed as
animals like pigs and cows, which consume more energy to
maintain their body temperatures. Ten pounds of feed yields one
pound of beef, three pounds of pork, five pounds of chicken and up
to six pounds of insect meat.
Insects produce less waste, too. The proportion of livestock that is
not edible after processing is 30% for pork, 35% for chicken, 45%
for beef and 65% for lamb. By contrast, only 20% of a cricket is
inedible.
Raising insects requires relatively little water, especially as
compared to the production of conventional meat (it takes more
than 10 gallons of water, for instance, to produce about two pounds
of beef). Insects also produce far less ammonia and other
greenhouse gases per pound of body weight. Livestock is
responsible for at least 10% of all greenhouse gas emissions.
Raising insects is more humane as well. Housing cattle, swine or
chicken in high densities causes stress to the animals, but insects
like mealworms and locusts naturally like to live in dense quarters.
The insects can be crowded into vertical stacked trays or cages.
Nor do bug farms have to be restricted to rural areas; they could
sprout up anywhere, from a suburban strip mall to an apartment
building. Enterprising gourmets could even keep a few trays of
mealworms in the garage to ensure a fresh supply.
The first insect fare is likely to be incorporated subtly into dishes,
as a replacement for meat in meatballs and sauces. It also can be
mixed into prepared foods to boost their nutritional value—like
putting mealworm paste into a quiche. And dry-roasted insects can
be used as a replacement for nuts in baked goods like cookies and
breads.
We continue to make progress in the Netherlands, where the
ministry of agriculture is funding a new $1.3 million research
program to develop ways to raise edible insects on food waste,
such as brewers' grain (a byproduct of beer brewing), soyhulls (the
skin of the soybean) and apple pomace (the pulpy remains after the
juice has been pressed out). Other research is focusing on how
protein could be extracted from insects and used in processed
foods.
Though it is true that intentionally eating insects is common only
in developing countries, everyone already eats some amount of
insects. The average person consumes about a pound of insects per
year, mostly mixed into other foods. In the U.S., most processed
foods contain small amounts of insects, within limits set by the
Food and Drug Administration. For chocolate, the FDA limit is 60
insect fragments per 100 grams. Peanut butter can have up to 30
insect parts per 100 grams, and fruit juice can have five fruit-fly
eggs and one or two larvae per 250 milliliters (just over a cup). We
also use many insect products to dye our foods, such as the red dye
cochineal in imitation crab sticks, Campari and candies. So we're
already some of the way there in making six-legged creatures a
regular part of our diet.
Not long ago, foods like kiwis and sushi weren't widely known or
available. It is quite likely that in 2020 we will look back in
surprise at the era when our menus didn't include locusts, beetle
larvae, dragonfly larvae, crickets and other insect delights.
—Mr. Dicke and Mr. Van Huis are professors of entomology at
Wageningen University in the Netherlands.
For further investigation
http://www.mnn.com/food/healthy-eating/stories/eat-bugs-save-theplanet
http://chapul.com/