With around 70 per cent of the world's agricultural land now being used for meat production, a Dutch insect specialist has suggested a novel way of catering to the world's growing population – by eating insects instead of mammals.Insects! What the hell is this guy smoki…
*checks nationality*
Ah. Right…
Speaking at the TEDGlobal 2010 conference in Oxford, entomologist Marcel Dicke claimed that insects are an ecologically sound – and tasty – alternative to meat.Marcel Dicke – not just a name, but a description….
Dicke, a professor at the Netherlands' Wageningen University, said that while 10kg of feed generates just 1kg of beef, 3kg of pork or 5kg of chicken, the same amount could sustain 9kg of locusts.
9 comments:
The revulsion against eating insects is a pretty arbitrary tabboo though. If the insects are nutritious then why not get stuck in?
We have always eaten insects in pulverised form in the base ingredients like flour, or in large colonies on cheese and other fresh foods.
Those who eat prawn and lobster have no reason to think other arthropoda are any less nutritious or delicious. The most abundant of these creatures are the various species of woodlouse. Bon appetit.
It tastes like shrimp, just not as fishy.
Nothing wrong with an addition to the table, it's the replacement idea that is the problem.
As long as there's beef I'll lay off the insects. After a nuclear war? Well then, we'll see.
Does the 9kg include the shells? It doesn't help if 10kg of feed is translated in to 8kg of crunchy chitin and 1kg of locust tails.
Mind you, the wiki suggests that chitin is so useful that the meat could be described as the by-product.
By the time it is breaded, nobody will know it from scampi. Change the name to "rock rabbit" or "garden lobster" or get Fearnley-Wittingstall to name a pet colony then deep-fry them and serve them with salt and a squeeze of lemon, and they'll be on the menu in no time.
Don't let that revolting Heston Bloomin-Silly at them or it will end up as a paste-noisettes of locust tail with a raspberry coulis served in caramelized casement of wings, and it will look like the cover of The Silence of the Lambs - but with no lamb.
It's been going on for centuries already. ;o)
"If the insects are nutritious then why not get stuck in?"
I felt like asking the house sparrow I watched struggling with a bloody great Cockchafer beetle earlier today.
She was struggling, to put it mildly...
The market is king, always has been, always will be.
VHS, not Betamax. BMW, not British Leyland. Beef, not beetles.
If bugs tasted that good, I'd be having them with my Yorkshire pud, instead of killing them with DDT.
"The revulsion against eating insects is a pretty arbitrary tabboo though. If the insects are nutritious then why not get stuck in?"
It's a purely western thing - in other cultures, insects are quite happily on the menu.
"We have always eaten insects in pulverised form in the base ingredients like flour, or in large colonies on cheese and other fresh foods."
Oh, true. But it's one thing not to see what we're eating, and quite another to contemplate the stuff presented a la carte!
"Nothing wrong with an addition to the table, it's the replacement idea that is the problem."
Yup, if people WISH to chow down, bon appetite! But not to please some ecoloon...
"Does the 9kg include the shells? It doesn't help if 10kg of feed is translated in to 8kg of crunchy chitin and 1kg of locust tails. "
Hmm, good point! I wonder if the good professor has been massaging his figures?
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