AUSTIN, Texas—Why aren’t you eating bugs? They’re
tiny terrors to some, but to a large percentage of the world, including
many countries in Africa and Asia, they’re nutritious delicacies and
environmentally-friendly to raise. This is according to a gathering of people who are
passionate about entomophagy, or insect eating, who advertised their
cause this week at the SXSW Eco meeting in Austin. Insects are a common source of food throughout the world,
including much of Latin America, Africa and Asia. One could say that
those of us in the Western world, where bug binging isn’t common, are
the odd ones out, said Robert Allen, founder of the nonprofit Little Herds, which encourages insect ingestion. Consider the common house cricket, Acheta domesticus.
Their bodies contain every essential amino acid, several times more
calcium than beef or pork and nine times more iron than chicken, Allen
said. Crickets can be fed on waste products like brewer’s yeast (a
byproduct of beer making), and cricket farming produces 2,800 times less
greenhouse gas emissions than cattle raising, he added. Insects also
require very little land to raise and do well in small cages...more
Roach Roast? Cricket Cookies? PETA will soon be mounting a bugs brigade or insect infantry to protect the crunchy critters. And schoolkids, you better hope Michelle O doesn't hear about this.
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