Burgers made from insects may not be to everyone’s fancy, yet a supermarket chain in Switzerland is going to introduce a food range made from insects. The bug burgers are made from mealworm larvae, which are produced to look and taste like beef as much as possible.
Insects make healthy foods. Mealworms provide protein, vitamins and minerals on a par with fish and meat. Small grasshoppers are close to lean ground beef in protein content, but with less fat per gram. Apparently they taste delicious — mealworms have a nutty flavour and grasshoppers have a similar taste to chicken.
Insects convert food into protein more efficiently, so they need less feed than animals. While it takes about 3,290 litres of water to produce a 150g beef burger, the equivalent insect burger needs less than 0.6 litres. Livestock use about a third of the Earth’s croplands to grow feed; insect farming needs very little land and they breed quickly.
Farming insects results in considerably fewer greenhouse gases than most livestock. Meat farming is a significant part of the climate-change problem, producing large amounts of gases, especially from sheep and cattle, which produce methane — a gas about 20 times more powerful as a heat-trapping gas than carbon dioxide. Add to that other gases, such as nitrogen oxides given off from fertilisers and carbon dioxide created in transport and refrigeration. The livestock industry produces 18 per cent of man-made greenhouse gases. Insects produce far fewer pollutants for the same weight of food.
The UN Food and Agriculture Organisation states that there are more than 1,900 edible species, and of these, hundreds are eaten by about two billion people regularly, cooked and raw. It is only in western countries that eating insects has an “ugh” factor. Perhaps that will change when health, environmental and climate advantages are made clear.
Source: The Times (UK)
