The UN
Food and Agriculture Organisation is taking seriously
the farming of creepy-crawlies as nutritious food
A Chinese woman selling scorpions on stick waits for customers at a stall in
Saving the planet one plateful at
a time does not mean cutting back on meat, according to new research: the trick
may be to switch our diet to insects and other
creepy-crawlies.
The raising of livestock such as
cows, pigs and sheep occupies two-thirds of the world's farmland and generates
20% of all the greenhouse gases driving global warming. As a result, the United Nations and senior figures want to reduce the amount of meat we
eat and the search is on for alternatives.
A policy paper on the eating of
insects is being formally considered by the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation. The FAO
held a meeting on the theme in Thailand in 2008 and there are plans for a
world congress in 2013.
Professor Arnold van Huis, an entomologist at
"There is a meat crisis,"
he said. "The world population will grow from six billion now to nine
billion by 2050 and we know people are consuming more meat. Twenty years ago
the average was 20kg, it is now 50kg, and will be 80kg in 20 years. If we
continue like this we will need another Earth."
Van Huis
is an enthusiast for eating insects but given his role as a consultant to the
FAO, he can't be dismissed as a crank. "Most of the world already eats
insects," he points out. "It is only in the western world that we
don't. Psychologically we have a problem with it. I don't know why, as we eat
shrimps, which are very comparable."
The advantages of this diet
include insects' high levels of protein, vitamin and mineral content. Van Huis's latest research, conducted
with colleague Dennis Oonincx, shows that farming
insects produces far less greenhouse gas than livestock. Breeding
commonly eaten insects such as locusts, crickets and meal worms, emits 10 times
less methane than livestock. The insects also produce 300 times less nitrous
oxide, also a warming gas, and much less ammonia, a pollutant produced by pig
and poultry farming.
Being cold-blooded, insects
convert plant matter into protein extremely efficiently, Van Huis says. In addition, he argues, the health risks are
lower. He acknowledges that in the west eating insects is a hard sell: "It
is very important how you prepare them, you have to do
it very nicely, to overcome the yuk factor."
More than 1,000 insects are known
to be eaten by choice around the world, in 80% of nations. They are most
popular in the tropics, where they grow to large sizes and are easy to harvest.
The FAO's
field officer Patrick Durst, based in
Durst helped set up an insect
farming project FAO project in
He also thinks such a boost can
provide livelihoods and protect forests where many wild insects are collected.
"I can see a step-by-step process to wider implementation."
First, insects could be used to
feed farmed animals such as chicken and fish which eat them naturally. Then,
they could be used as ingredients.
Van Huis
adds: "We're looking at ways of grinding the meat into some sort of patty,
which would be more recognisable to western
palates."
One of the few suppliers of
insects for human consumption in the
• This article was amended on 2
August 2010. In the original, Professor Arnold van Huis
was described as an entomologist at