Eating Insects - The food of the future?

I have just been listenimg to Costing the Earth on BBC Radio 4 presented by Tom Heap.

He was considering the fact that due to over population and mankinds need for HBV protiens we might be heading towards a society that by neccesity gets some of its protien from bugs.

He kicked off the programming eating a locust stir fry in Bristol, then visted Bart Hogerbrink in the netherlands to taste some cookies made with meal worm flour.

Both recipies sound fine, I think, although steak and chips sounds better.

The fact is that insects are VERY efficient at coonverting what they eat in to protien, WAY WAY WAY more efficient than a cow, sheep, pig or even a chicken.

BEEF VERSUS CRICKETS PROTIEN YIELD

So it can be seen that Beef is quite lavish in terms of resource use. Other insects such as meal worms will eat rotten fruit and vege proving high quality nutrients from waste.

With meat prices set to double in the next ten years, meat will certainly become a luxury, we will all probably eat less meat

Whether we eat bugs instead is another question I suppose. We could use them to feed fish . . .

Politicians and their muddled thinking.

When will green thinking become unified, we cannot put aside our good farmland for nature projects whilst we rely on imports. It’s not fair that we hurtle towards the 80% emissions cuts whilst we chow down on Brazilian beef cooked in a Chinese oven with French electricity. LDV and Rover will add to these carbon savings, but in their place we have unemployment and hundreds of failing subsidiary businesses that depended on their custom. We must see new jobs created in green industries in the UK; there must be jobs. If we build a solar panel in England and it is 5% less efficient and 5% more money than the German one then, that is fine it is British and will get better in time.

Interference with farming annoys me; British farms should be producing more food WHY? So we don’t have to IMPORT everything. 90% of apples are foreign, beef from brazil, lamb from New Zealand, and we are flooding good farm land for marsh warblers, and fencing off streams to increase bio diversity, does any one stop to think of the container ship laboring through heavy seas from the southern hemisphere, laden with low welfare standard meat, burning heavy marine oils as it does so?

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