Buggin' Out

Is Eating Insects The Way Of The Future?

“For dinner tonight, we’ll be starting with a bowl of simple carrot buffalo worm soup, then moving on to deep-fried tarantula with grasshopper kabobs, followed by some tasty buglava (baklava with crickets) for dessert.” While this might sound like something you’d expect to hear while having dinner served up by Dracula’s assistant Renfield, entomophagy — the eating of insects — is common throughout the world, and some are hoping it will catch on in the West.

Why Entomophagy?

According to a report by the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), “It is widely accepted that by 2050 the world will host 9 billion people. To accommodate this number, current food production will need to almost double. Land is scarce and expanding the area devoted to farming is rarely a viable or sustainable option.”

Considering that an estimated one out of every nine people in the world is hungry currently, a looming food crisis is something that needs to be addressed.

It’s estimated that around 2 billion people currently eat insects as a regular part of their diet — with beetles (Coleoptera) the most common. Along with beetles, bees, wasps, caterpillars, ants, crickets, grasshoppers, termites, tarantulas, and more, which are consumed both cooked and raw across the globe. While much of the entomophagy takes place in tropical areas where insects are plentiful, the idea of cultivating insects as a sustainable form of protein is spreading.