10 Interesting Facts about Insects as Food for People

Insects are an untapped resource. There are so many insects on earth, and by mass, there are more insects on earth than people. They’re really the ones running the planet here. It’s all about getting past what they look like, because, let’s be honest, they look like bugs. But once cooked, they taste as good as anything. Lots of people in many countries have been doing it for ages but this has come to the knowledge of the masses only in recent times, thanks to television and the web.

Insects may be an increasingly important source of protein because of the rising cost of animal protein, food insecurity, environmental pressures, climate change, and population growth. Edible insects often contain high-quality protein, vitamins, minerals, and amino acids for humans. Edible insects can also be more environmentally friendly than livestock. They emit fewer greenhouse gases and ammonia than conventional livestock and can be fed on organic waste streams.

Let’s see what the ‘human-eat-insects’ facts are:

1. Two billion people eat insects and you can too. Human insect-eating is common to many cultures. Over 1,000 species of insects are known to be eaten in 80% of the world’s nations. That helps to explain why 36 African countries are “entomophagous,” as are 23 in the Americas, 29 in Asia, and even 11 in Europe. Thailand is now the largest producer of edible insects.

2. A cockroach consists of about 65% protein, whereas beef is about 50% protein.

3. Insects are good candidates for farming because they don’t need a lot of space and produce protein quickly. Also it takes significantly more effort to farm agriculture than it would to farm crickets.

5. In the Congo, families eat as much as 96 tons of caterpillars every year.

6. Britain’s first insect restaurant in Wales called Grub Kitchen serves a variety of insect-based dishes, with grasshopper, crickets and mealworms. United States has plenty of restaurants that have grub in their menu and now, it seems, more and more of them are catching on.

7. According to the FAO, insects have a high food conversion rate — crickets need 12 times less feed than cattle, four times less than sheep, and half as much feed as pigs and broiler chickens to produce the same amount of protein.

8. Stinkbugs have an apple flavor, and red agave worms are spicy. A bite of tree worm apparently brings pork rinds to mind.

9. A report released the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization recommends us to consume more insects. Here, have a read.

10. The Bible mentions entomophagy, as do texts from Ancient Greece and Rome.