History of Eating Insects
The practice of eating insects is called entomophagy, and we’ve been doing it since prehistoric times. Shoutout to the wiki article on entomophagy which is extremely well written. I recommend checking it out as a starting point for those who want to learn more after the episode.
Around 2 billion people eat insects around the world, mostly in Central and South America, Africa, Asia, and even a bit in Australia and New Zealand, although it’s less common from my experience. It’s more taboo in western culture, but it shouldn’t be! It’s slowly becoming more acceptable in western cultures to eat insects, and in Seattle toasted grasshoppers are a big hit at Mariners baseball games.
There are about 2000 arthropods globally that are known to be safe for human consumption. Arthropods are invertebrate animals with an exoskeleton, segmented body, and paired jointed appendages. The category includes insects, arachnids, myriapods (centipedes, millipedes etc), and crustaceans. So if you’re eating crab and lobster, you’re already partway there. Crickets are so similar to shellfish they put allergy warnings on cricket powder saying people with shellfish allergies may react to cricket as well.
It’s kind of funny that we eat lobster, which used to be fed to servants and prison inmates until rules were passed to prevent something considered so cruel. Perhaps we’ll soon be there with bugs!
So why don’t we eat them in the west? A New York Times article suggests that because Europe spent so much of it’s history covered in ice, it only has about 2% of the world’s edible insects and they don’t get nearly as big as they do in warmer climates, so they were never worth hunting. We associate them with things that are dirty or decaying or carrying disease. Also the bible says not to do it (Leviticus 11:41 ‘And every creeping thing that creeps on the earth shall be an abomination. It shall not be eaten.’) so that’s that. Early explorers saw people eating insects in different countries and viewed it as animal-like. As Europeans took over large parts of the world, they took the idea of not eating insects with them, so we can thank colonialism for setting us way back on this one. Missionaries were especially influential in Africa and changed the way people viewed eating insects.
To be fair, it’s not like we’re super weird for not eating insects. Out of 800,000 arthropods, only 2000 are edible. But that same article says we can expect rapid growth in demand in the west for insects in the next few years, which is promising because there’s lots of great reasons to eat bugs!
Surprise, we already eat bugs!
Each year we eat 2lbs of insects! What?? They wind up in food like peanut butter, spices, or canned fruit and veg. The US FDA allows certain quantities to pass into the food Americans buy. “For every ¼ cup of cornmeal, the FDA allows an average of one or more whole insects, two or more rodent hairs and 50 or more insect fragments, or one or more fragments of rodent dung.” - CNN
Not to mention honey. A teaspoon of honey represents the lifetime regurgitation of 50 bees. So we’re already consuming hidden insects and the byproducts of insects. Pass the cricket powder!
What insects do people eat?
The most popular are beetles, caterpillars, bees, wasps, ants, grasshoppers, locusts, and crickets.
I saw scorpions on sticks in Beijing, and bought mealworm and cricket powder here in Canada. In Australia, on a tour I did in Darwin, ants are picked right off of trees and eaten by brave tourists. They taste citrusy and are high in vitamin C.
In Kushihara Japan there’s an annual wasp festival where wasp-hunters sell snacks like wasp mochi, chocolate wasps, and full wasp nests. It’s all considered a delicacy.
There are loads of insects to eat! Dragonflies, grubs, termites, the list goes on.
Why Eat Bugs?
Everyone who eats insects say they’re tasty. 2 billion people aren’t eating bugs because they DON’T taste good. Apparently stinkbugs taste like apples. But just as important, they’re sustainable alternatives to the meat industry.
From an article by Samuel Imathiu from the University of Agriculture and Technology, Nairobi, Kenya
“The current research evidence shows that edible insects can play a significant role in addressing food and nutrition insecurities and this should be encouraged. Scientific evidence shows that edible insects’ nutritional quality is equivalent and sometimes exceeds that of animal-based foods. This and the fact that edible insects have a faster growth rate, high food conversion efficiency and requires less resources to rear compared to livestock should make them a more attractive quality food source especially to the rural poor in the developing countries.”
Environmental Benefits
We’ve talked a lot already in previous episodes about how animal agriculture is a big culprit in climate change, but as a refresher, livestock account for 14% of global greenhouse gas emissions, and use about 70% of the world’s agricultural land. And production is expected to ramp up as global demand continues to increase. As countries become wealthier, and more urbanized, they’re meat consumption grows. So, fighting climate change means overhauling our current food system. Eating insects can help in a few ways.
1) Insects can be fed on food industry by-products, which helps reduce waste and environmental contamination. This would be more for the insects being raised as feed for other animals. For people, we want to feed bugs food grade food. Or if the waste they’re eating is food waste like apple cores and melon rinds, stuff like that, then it would probably be alright for us. But this needs more study, and most of the farms I looked into feed them a grain meal. Here is a little more information than we went into on the episode.
2) Less food waste, since the whole cricket is being used. In addition, Entomo Farms (where I got my cricket powder) says their crickets’ manure and sheddings, called frass, are sold to farmers and gardeners as high quality fertilizer.
3) Insects emit fewer greenhouse gases and less ammonia than cattle or pigs. Methane, one of the worst greenhouse gases, is produced by only a few insect groups, such as termites and cockroaches. Overall, bugs produce one tenth as much methane as conventional livestock. When compared to chickens, which are greener than bigger livestock, crickets emit half as much C02 and use 25 percent less water. From the FAO paper:
4) They need less land, water, and food, and you don’t have to clear cut spaces to raise them. “Because they are cold-blooded, insects are very efficient at converting feed into protein (crickets, for example, need 12 times less feed than cattle, four times less feed than sheep, and half as much feed as pigs and broiler chickens to produce the same amount of protein)”.
As an email from Entomo Farms put it “less feed means less land, water, fertilizers, and transportation”. However, this is a little contested. When fed certain organic waste diets they’ve been found to have the same feed conversion as chickens. The feed the big farms use do make them more efficient, but everyone is still trying to figure out the best stuff to feed them.
By 2025, nearly 2 billion people are expected to be living with water scarcity, and more than half of our freshwater is being used in agriculture. 1kg of animal protein requires 5-20 times more water than 1kg of grain protein, or 100 times if you include the water required for forage and grain production to feed the animals. 1kg of beef requires 22000-43000 litres of fresh water. Cricket needs less, although the numbers are all over the place when I look it up. The highest estimates were 100-250l, but one source said 10l and another said 1l. Regardless, at the highest estimate it’s still a huge drop from the water requirements of cows.
For land, you need about 200 square metres to grow 1lb of beef, but you only need 15 square metres to grow 1lb of cricket. They could be good for vertical farming if they’re being kept in crates. One farm said 10’x3’ crates are used, but they can be kept in smaller boxes for small scale operations.
5) Insects are ready to eat way faster than other animals. They transform from larva to adults within weeks. There are loads of species of crickets, but most of them die of old age after 10 weeks, and none live more than a year.
As a bonus, all of the ways bugs are more environmentally friendly than livestock also makes them cheaper. While it’s still a little pricey to get insects here in Canada, it will become more cost effective for the consumer when everyone is eating them.
Eating insects isn’t just for people. They can be used to feed pets and livestock! We’ll probably have to start using them as our food’s food. The FAO figures worldwide production of animal feed will have to increase by as much as 70 percent to be able to feed the world by 2050, when we’ll have around 9 billion people on the planet. Switching from meat meal, fish meal, and soybean meal would help mitigate the production problems that come with those industries. We’ve talked about these problems in our milk, vegetarian, and seafood episodes in a bit more detail.
Health Benefits
Insects contain loads of protein, vitamins, minerals, and amino acids. They’re loaded with omega 3 fats, iron, magnesium, calcium, zinc, and fibre. The exoskeleton of insects actually makes their fibre content pretty high. This obviously varies widely based on the insects being eaten. There are nearly 2000 remember! But for the most part they’re hella good for you.
Entomo Farms talk about the nutrients in cricket powder on their site and use what I think is a misleading metric, which is comparing the nutrients to beef, pound for pound. My cricket powder was really expensive, and I won’t be able to eat a whole pound of cricket the same way I could eat a cheese burger. Or at least I can’t yet, I demand a cricket cheeseburger!
Although, 2tbsp have 400% of my B12 intake. So maybe I don’t need a cricket burger. But if I do want one, I just have to wait; as production ramps up, price will go down.
“Compared with mammals and birds, insects may also pose less risk of transmitting zoonotic infections to humans, livestock and wildlife, although this topic requires further research.” So mad cow and H1N1 and salmonella for example appear to be less likely to be transmitted. But because we’re not farming insects on large scale right now, more research should be done.
Pest Harvesting and Lifting People out of Poverty
From the wiki article on Entomophagy: Some researchers have proposed entomophagy as a solution to policy incoherence created by traditional agriculture, by which conditions are created which favor a few insect species, which then multiply and are termed "pests". In parts of Mexico, the grasshopper Sphenarium purpurascens is controlled by its capture and use as food. Such strategies allow decreased use of pesticide and create a source of income for farmers totaling nearly US$3000 per family. Environmental impact aside, some argue that pesticide use is inefficient economically due to its destruction of insects which may contain up to 75 percent animal protein in order to save crops containing no more than 14 percent protein.
“In the past two decades, villagers in impoverished north-eastern Thailand have started housing crickets in concrete pens in their backyards. As demand for the insects has risen, so have profits: One farmer reportedly went from selling 10 kilograms to more than two tons a day. Now around 20,000 such farms have been established, collectively earning more than $3 million a year.” - New York Times
Is It Cruel?
As Kristen has said before on the show, it’s a little tricky when you look at how one cow can feed a number of people, while a number of crickets are needed to feed one person. So is it ethical to do that?
There hasn’t been much research done on insect welfare and laws are suuuuper loose about how to raise and protect insects. The farm I bought my powder from puts the cricket welfare in their advertising, but I don’t think we should rely on the kindness of cricket farmers entirely.
It’s most likely that insects do not feel pain, but we’re not sure. So, the safest thing to do is to regulate the treatment of insects in farming. Kristen was a little skeptical of the “they probably don’t feel pain?” argument I offered, so here’s all the reading I did on it to land on that unhelpful statement.
It’s pretty easy to kill insects humanely and unlike mammals, they like living in high density situations. It’s important to regulate the slaughter methods, because there are humane ways to do it, such as lowering the temperature until they go into hibernation and then eventually die (24hrs to be safe), and inhumane, like boiling, frying, steaming, roasting, etc. There are some that are served and eaten still alive, which ranks pretty low on my humane scale.
Entomo says they treat the crickets ethically. They live at least 80% of their natural life cycle in large open rooms instead of crates. They roam freely and have constant access to food and water. I guess that’s better?
For farms that do use crates, they’re reasoning is that crates can be stacked to use space more efficiently and they’re usually given nooks and crannies and objects to climb on and hide in, for they’re comfort.
Brian Tomasik, who writes about reducing animal suffering, argues that eating insects isn’t ethical, and one of his best points was: is it ethical to bring more insects into existence in farming operations, if their lives are worse off than in their natural habitat? Even if large farms do a good job, amateur farms are likely to cause harm by neglect or making mistakes, like forgetting to feed and water them.
What do you think?
Downsides of Eating Insects
We have to be careful of over-doing it. Most insects are still harvested from the wild rather than farmed, so it’s possible to accidentally destroy the local insect population. From what I could find this is pretty rare, but still something to consider.
Wild caught insects are also more likely to have pesticides if they’ve been hanging around crops, which is a bad thing for us to be eating.
Because production isn’t mainstream, there needs to be more studies done on concentrations of heavy metals, pesticides, and allergens. Also, infrastructure and machinery for mainstream harvesting is still new and it’s loosely regulated or not regulated at all in most countries. It’s hard to know how safe the production process is for turning out food. If insects are being raised on farms with poor quality or straight up rotten feed, then humans are getting that nasty bacteria.
We have to be careful about introducing insects into environments where they might cause harm. It’s difficult to bring live insects into Australia, for example, and I don’t think that’s a bad thing. While farms might remain mostly closed, it’s gotta be pretty hard to contain them fully.
Because farming insects is not a well understood industry, scaling it up to meet the demands of a population pushing 8 billion people will probably bring surprise issues that are difficult to see now but obvious in hindsight.
They look nasty as fuck. I read an article by Angela Skujins who tried to eat insects in every meal for a week, and it was a huge failure, she lost 4 pounds and thought she’d die of starvation.
Crickets still need to eat food. So they’ll still require crops and energy from heating their facilities (although because they like darkness, a bit of energy is saved by keeping the lights out).
Overall, if you’re looking for the most ethical diet, it’s still vegan.
So Are We All Going To Be Eating Insects?
The industry is slowly growing. In 2018 Sainsbury’s in the UK started carrying Crunchy Roasted Crickets. Whole Foods and Loblaw here in Canada also apparently stock it, although I’ve never noticed and I’ll have to watch out for it now. More than 100 companies currently exist that produce their own branded foods made from insects.
The industry was worth less than a billion dollars in 2019, but is projected to be worth as much as 8 billion dollars by 2030.
Aspire Food Group, a farm in Texas, is ramping up the size of it’s operation because demand for cricket powder is so high.
So will people eat bugs? Yeah probably someday. Sushi was very stigmatized when it was first introduced in the west but grew popular because restaurants put it on their menus and patrons trusted the chefs to present something edible. We might just be one popular restaurant chain and an influencer munching on a cricket burger away from cricket chips in every cupboard.
Further Info
Fun Fact of the episode: when crickets are ready to mate, they make their chirping noise. If a whole bunch of them are ready to go at once, it gets hella loud in the big farms and farmers have to wear headphones.
Here is a great short video on eating insects!
And another!
And a podcast episode from Wall Street Journal’s Future of Everything
