Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice

Joanna DetzYou know who you are. You poor, apologetic carnivore, buying that pricey locally raised, grass-fed beef because it satisfies both your appetite and your meat-eater guilt. (You repeat to yourself that your hamburger had a happy and sustainable existence — as you apply the ketchup.)

Well, Hamburger Hipster, it’s time to up the ante in the sustainability department.

Have a beetle burger.

It turns out that raising insects for food has an enviably low impact on the environment — even that darling of the sustainable food movement, grass-fed beef, can’t compete. To this point, a policy paper recently presented to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) focused attention on the cultivation of insects for food. There are plans for a world congress on the subject in 2013.

Professor Arnold van Huis, an entomologist at Wageningen University in the Netherlands and the author of the U.N. paper, says we may experience a short-rib shortfall in the coming decades.

“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 44 pounds (per person, per year); it is now 110 pounds and will be 176 pounds in 20 years. If we continue like this we will need another Earth,” van Huis wrote.

In other words, we’re screwed, unless we either address the bugaboo of population control or change our consumption habits. Since the former is about as likely a scenario as finding another Earth, we should focus on reducing our consumption of resources, and we can start with meat.

Many resources go into that hamburger before it even hits your plate. One of those resources is water. According to National Geographic, it takes 660 gallons of water to produce a single hamburger.

Insects, on the other hand, require little water and few resources.  According to van Huis, breeding commonly eaten insects such as locusts, crickets and mealworms, 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.

And, though they lag slightly behind beef in the protein department, insects still pack a protein punch. In their dried form, as they are commonly sold in Africa, grasshoppers may contain up to 60 percent protein.

OK, so, let’s say you’ve bought in to the idea that raising insects for food requires fewer resources and they are an efficient source of protein, but you still cringe at the thought of eating them.

Well, what about lobster? Shrimp? These menu mainstays are essentially sea insects that have risen to the status of entrée superstars.

Sure, it’ll take some marketing mettle — the same Madison Avenue genius that rebranded the hitherto geriatric “prune” as the hip “dried plum”— but, perhaps if reintroduced as “land lobsters,” cockroaches could take center stage on dinner plates across America.

Don’t dismiss the power of marketing. Case in point: McNuggets. Consumers gobble them up while turning a blind eye to the fact that they contain 38 — mostly secret — ingredients, only one of which is chicken. Dimethylpolysiloxene? They’re “Lovin’ it.”

But, despite the fact that mainstream America seems willingly to embrace an alphabet soup of chemical additives in their food, it will likely be a long time before we see “McBuggets” listed on McDonald’s Value Menu.

Joanna Detz is an ecoRI staffer, and a vegetarian.

Comments

[noMilknoBooze]

Hey, bugs have feelings, too, ya know

[Tom Ardito]

VERY nicely written piece! That said, I'm not eating bugs anytime soon.

[Mowgli]

I'll eat anything. My parents tell me they ate fried bugs in Peru. Anything tastes good if its fried. :)