Guest essay by Eric Worrall
A new study suggests that people could be eased into an eco-friendly insect protein diet by slipping insect protein into pre-packaged foods.
Edible insects could play key role in cutting harmful emissions
May 4, 2017
Eating insects instead of beef could help tackle climate change by reducing harmful emissions linked to livestock production, research suggests.
Replacing half of the meat eaten worldwide with crickets and mealworms would cut farmland use by a third, substantially reducing emissions of greenhouse gases, researchers say.
While consumers’ reluctance to eat insects may limit their consumption, even a small increase would bring benefits, the team says. This could potentially be achieved by using insects as ingredients in some pre-packaged foods.
Using data collected primarily by the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization, scientists have compared the environmental impacts of conventional meat production with those of alternative sources of food. It is the first study to do so.
Researchers at the University of Edinburgh and Scotland’s Rural College considered a scenario in which half of the current mix of animal products is replaced by insects, lab-grown meat or imitation meat.
They found that insects and imitation meat—such as soybean-based foods like tofu—are the most sustainable as they require the least land and energy to produce. Beef is by far the least sustainable, the team says.
Read more: https://phys.org/news/2017-05-edible-insects-key-role-emissions.html
The Abstract of the study;
Could consumption of insects, cultured meat or imitation meat reduce global agricultural land use?
Peter Alexandera, Calum Browna, Almut Arnethc, Clare Diasa, John Finnigand, Dominic Moranb, e, Mark D.A. Rounsevella
Animal products, i.e. meat, milk and eggs, provide an important component in global diets, but livestock dominate agricultural land use by area and are a major source of greenhouse gases. Cultural and personal associations with animal product consumption create barriers to moderating consumption, and hence reduced environmental impacts. Here we review alternatives to conventional animal products, including cultured meat, imitation meat and insects (i.e. entomophagy), and explore the potential change in global agricultural land requirements associated with each alternative. Stylised transformative consumption scenarios where half of current conventional animal products are substituted to provide at least equal protein and calories are considered. The analysis also considers and compares the agricultural land area given shifts between conventional animal product consumption. The results suggest that imitation meat and insects have the highest land use efficiency, but the land use requirements are only slightly greater for eggs and poultry meat. The efficiency of insects and their ability to convert agricultural by-products and food waste into food, suggests further research into insect production is warranted. Cultured meat does not appear to offer substantial benefits over poultry meat or eggs, with similar conversion efficiency, but higher direct energy requirements. Comparison with the land use savings from reduced consumer waste, including over-consumption, suggests greater benefits could be achieved from alternative dietary transformations considered. We conclude that although a diet with lower rates of animal product consumption is likely to create the greatest reduction in agricultural land, a mix of smaller changes in consumer behaviour, such as replacing beef with chicken, reducing food waste and potentially introducing insects more commonly into diets, would also achieve land savings and a more sustainable food system.
Read more: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2211912417300056
From Table 2 of the full study;
… Consumer acceptability barriers in some regions. A lower level of uptake in combination, perhaps as an ingredient, e.g. in pre-packaged foods, seems more likely. …
Read more: Same link as above
Packaged food is already substantially contaminated with insect waste, the FDA allows shocking levels of insect contamination in everyday foods. So it could be argued that they are simply allowing the insects to have a bit more of a munch on the goods before they reach the consumer.
Nevertheless I don’t think intentionally eating insects is going to catch on, even amongst greens. Greens seem to be mostly hypocrites, WUWT frequently showcases the amount of petroleum based synthetic fabric on show at your average anti fossil fuel eco-protest.
Insects are not kosher food, except some types of locust.
https://www.kingjamesbibleonline.org/Leviticus-11-22/
I’m sure I’d check Leviticus to know whether I eat well. But yeah, a PC argument because tolerance.
Insects have six legs, so the last bit clearly does not apply to them. And beetles are about 40% of all insects, so any competent theologian should be able to turn that piece into an insect-eating commandment.
The four leg thing is really strange. One would reckon the Creator should know which animal is endowed with how many legs.
Those “fowls that creep, going upon all four” sound much like bats instead of insects.
I long puzzled over that passage.
It appears that the Hebrew word “oph”, here translated as “fowl”, at least originally, meant any flying creature, but later came nearer to the restricted meaning of the term in English, ie a particular group of birds.
Even a casual observer, without eating them, would note that insects have six legs, and indeed orthopterans use all six of them when walking, ie “creeping”, including the big back ones employed for hopping. So I conclude that “going on all fours” here isn’t meant literally, but to connote “creeping”.
lol this is so funny … you have been eating bugs for yrs .. all processed food contains up to 5-10% bugs or what not ..
when I worked for a lrg supplier of liquorice we would have an outbreak of flour weevils flour bins crawling with them .. so they just stopped delivery’s of flour and used what they had till it was gone a week or more 🙂
and yes they are allowed by law ..
Yes, you should say that again.
Yes Eric – another good advice in the internet is http://edition.cnn.com/2017/05/03/health/germany-vegan-vegetarian-diets/index.html
Don’t think Germans really eat that !
food industry newsletters i follow are pushing cricket flour to add to snacks, as well as todays latest uck why? gem
which is?
algae oils
yup
to replace butter etc
theyre looking for an extra market to reuse the waste they generate inc washwaters,
so plant material gets processed for the supplement industry(think the orange/citrus peels beet pulps for colourings etc grape seed n skins tomato skin waste etc etc)
then those dregs are now targeted for extra sales to insect feed.
the poor animals that used to get the peels n rinds pretty fresh , now no longer see it, it comes back as the utter dry drained dry dregs baked into pellets with some added chemicals to make it claimable as some slight form of nutrition and a HUGE cost increase as well.
grow the grass n root crops etc and feed the animals direct!
If there is life there is CO2 consumption (plants and algae) and CO2 production (animals and microbes). If it is not farm land or crop land it will still be plant covered, support animal life and participate in the CO2 cycle. The only way to satisfy the “CO2 is bad fetish” is to scorch the planet. There is no logic in this idiocy, just superstitious magical thinking and antihumanism.
I guess they want us all to return to being apes !! (except for the liberal elite, of course) !
The elites see us as apes already. The NYT occasionally sends an adventurous reporter into Flyover Country to report incredulously on zoological wonders like farmers, hillbillies and coal miners.
and after eating all those insects we’ll have to find a way to replicate the functions they provide to the environment.
so….plastic bugs with microcontrollers buiilt using oil….
I say we start with mosquito Doritos.
It’s only a matter of time before some kook goes full Soylent Green and says we have to eat dead people to save the planet. Where’s the over/under? 3 years?
I think Al Gore and Bill Nye should take the lead on this.
They’re too busy being “wood sprites” on Beltane.
My analog: Reasearch suggest that even a moderate increase of Beano(tm) could substantially reduce human methane emissions in countries where the predominate protein is legumes. The cost benefit analysis shows that even moderately modifying methane emission there far out weighs trying to reform the existing economic structure of meat production. Prior research on including Beano(tm) on the product was ineffective due to the breakdown that occurs during boiling. Consumers, in the study group in Columbia, a simple spray at the end of cooking might be most effective. Unfortunately carbon footprint studies indicate that a real question as to net methane reductions would have to take into account the plastic spray bottle lasting over 100,000. applications requiring the need of educational development as well. A target study was purposes that would including a district in Columbia, last 10 years, and only cost $27 million. WHI and the WB were very excited but felt US governmental funding was important.
When I was in elem. school in the ’70s a kid ate a grasshopper on the playground during recess. Then he started crying. They sent a note home to his parents about his abnormal behavior. He was forever stigmatized as the kid who eats bugs.
In the ’70s it was abnormal, anti-social behavior to eat bugs, now we have Phds encouraging people to eat bugs.
It’s amazing how fast cultural norms change.
During Plebe summer at the Naval Academy in 1965 the upper class made us eat roasted grasshoppers as part of our hazing.
He should’ve pulled the back legs off first. Those are hard and spiny and could really abrade your throat and esophagus on the way down. That’s probably why he started crying; it hurt like hell.
The amazing part is how few actually push the buttons of change.
In grade 8 a kid ate a witchetty grub he found when we were all out digging something and the rest of us just thought it was cool. It looked white and tasty, something like seafood. Mind our boarding school diet left something to be desired.
When they pry my cheeseburger out of my cold dead fingers.
They’ll pry mine out of my cold dead teeth and gums. =)
The subject of population reduction came up in this thread. It is actually quite surprising to me how often , in a discussion of all kinds of things (not just climate related), I can turn the subject round to a considered bit of thinking about cost/benefit analysis. Then, as a “curved ball”, I produce my back of an envelope calculation which shows a 1,2, or 3 magnitudes benefit to the solution of free condoms, free birth control pills and free abortion on demand as the clear winner in the argument.
Try it out ! The reactions can be “interesting”.
So, on a simple consideration of economics we get, for many problems, the simple truth that it wouldn’t be a problem if we weren’t here in such an “unacceptable density”. It’s the leftist “guilt” thing we have identified relating to CAGW but it’s provable via my method.
Why? (I am hoping your answer includes horse sh1t).
Beef is a good source of other nutrients: Iron, B vitamins and magnesium. Are bugs?
And beef i.e. cattle provide nutrients for bugs.
That is it!
I am going home and grilling up a fat juicy steak!
On second thought…make that two steaks!
And the EPA drone program of monitoring backyard grilling has been canceled.
This is how it begins, in the odd news section. Then years later an over reach administration makes it mandatory eating or be fined or taxed on the other foods to force the desired outcome. Think ethanol.
For a horrid thought, it is a very good thing that entomophagy did not become a popular theme a few years ago, or Michelle Obama would have pushed it in her school lunch program.
The future is even farther down the food chain. We should skip eating insects and go directly to eating single celled protein. There is a fake meat product out there now called Quorn. Their slogan should rip-off the Seiko Quartz ad and be “Someday all food will be made this way”.
I tried a piece of that once. I suspect that if that’s the future of food, a lot of people will turn to cannibalism to avoid it.
Someday someone will actually get close to synthetic meat – mind you they’ve been trying on dairy for decades without much success.
It’s pretty good in curry or Chili, but quorn sausages are an affront to humanity.
Gareth, when YOU eat a cockroach, does that count as cannibalism ?
What opponents to meat eating seem to forget in those types of studies comparing land use and production issues is that most meat is produced on land not suitable for much, if anything, else.
Of all land currently used for some form of food production there is only approx. 30% that is suitable to be worked over with machinery. In general that is land with an incline of less then 8 degrees. Other relatively flat land is just not fertile enough to sustain cropping of any kind, this is where you get the ratio of 1 animal to 10 acres and more. In Spain they use that kind of land to build cities of hothouses which now provide food for northern Europe. Just to show that waste land can be used for productive alternatives.
Of the land that is suitable to be worked with machinery and fertile enough the laws of economics play the major part (in some regions historical use but that is a different story). The farmer will grow, dairy-grain-fruit-vegetables-whatever is the most lucrative on that land in that location.
Not a lot of beef is raised on land that can be more economically used for a crop.
Land suitable for cropping is more expensive making it unsuitable for beef anyway.
If you ever look at land for sale and it says “suitable for goats” in the ad, it means that the land is very steep or dry that nothing else can be done there. Too steep or dry for beef even.
The major exceptions being traditionally grown rice in Asia and grapes in parts of Europe. Steep hillsides, a lot of manual labour.
Insect farms will be build on land that is as flat as possible to minimise building costs. In other words more then likely it will be on land currently used for anything other then meat production.
They will be close to cities which in itself will mean that any application to build one will be mired in court battles for the next 1000 years as nimby ism sets in. Although it might be a good use for some of the old, crumbling, empty factory buildings in the US’s New England area.
Nothing wrong with eating insects though and some of them and/or their larvae taste really good. But no need to pay for these sorts of studies. If it would be commercially interesting Unilever and Kraft would be right onto it.
“suggests further research into insect production is warranted”
The day I see a study that says “further research is not warranted,” is the day I believe the science is settled.
“Animals, including insects, are important or even sole sources of numerous necessary nutrients, such as the eight essential amino acids, vitamin B12, riboflavin, the biologically active form of vitamin A, and several minerals. (See table below.) Insects are particularly high in protein, with levels comparable to beef and milk. House crickets, for example, contain approximately 21 grams of protein per 100 grams of cricket, while ground beef contains about 26 grams per 100 grams of meat and powdered whole milk contains about 26 grams of protein per 100 grams. Insects are also particularly rich in fat, and can thus supply a high caloric contribution to the human diet, particularly in famine-stricken areas of the world.”
Yummy.
I actually had three scorpions on a stick last time I visit Beijing. Perhaps it is the tourist thing to do. They were boiled and spiced and it was like eating rice crispies, lol. So just like animals, I don’t mind eating insects so long as they aren’t moving 🙂
What is the comparative volume of 100 grams of crickets and 100 grams of beef?
“Animal products, i.e. meat, milk and eggs, provide an important component in global diets”
Not people’s diets, or human diets, in globalist borgspeak indoctrination lingo, but global diets . .. Sorta like deplorables diets I take it, without the hint of potential eye contact . .
Oh, you don’t say, Prince Charles . . Which are your favorites? ; )
Insect protein would definitely assist with hunger in the 3rd world like Africa and India etc and would be a quick and easy way to provide easily farmed processed insects. As has been noted here by other commenters, our foods like cereal grains here in the 1st world already can legally have a fairly high percentage (5%) imbedded in processed foods without any acknowledgment of such. It is actually a healthy food, and will not harm anyone.
I see there is a move afoot to eat raw insects, some even alive. Now, I will have to be starving before I do that, but eating processed dried insects in some type of packaged meal is not that far fetched. After all, some people like eating raw fish with worms in it, and they call it Sushi. Or raw fish eggs from Sturgeon, and they call that Caviar. It is only perspective and conditioning that make us feel yucky about dried insect protein. Probably a huge business going forward when Earth’s population keeps growing.
Sorry, not into de evolution, you want to eat garbage? Go right ahead. Cannot imagine throwing a juicy worm on the grill during a bbq. Let the fern fondelers and climate change morons have their fill.