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LIFE & CULTURE FEBRUARY 19, 2011

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The Six-Legged Meat of the FutureInsects are nutritious and easy to raise without harming the environment. They also have a nice nutty taste

By MARCEL DICKE and ARNOLD VAN HUIS

At the London

restaurant

Archipelago,

diners can

order the $11

Baby Bee

Brulee: a

creamy custard

topped with a

crunchy little

bee. In New

York, the

Mexican

restaurant

Toloache offers

$11 chapulines

tacos: two tacos

stuffed with

Oaxacan-style

dried

grasshoppers.

Could beetles, dragonfly larvae and water bug caviar be the meat of the future? As the global population booms

and demand strains the world's supply of meat, there's a growing need for alternate animal proteins. Insects are

high in protein, B vitamins and minerals like iron and zinc, and they're low in fat. Insects are easier to raise than

livestock, and they produce less waste. Insects are abundant. Of all the known animal species, 80% walk on six

legs; over 1,000 edible species have been identified. And the taste? It's often described as "nutty."

The vast majority of the developing world already eats insects. In Laos and Thailand, weaver-ant pupae are a

highly prized and nutritious delicacy. They are prepared with shallots, lettuce, chilies, lime and spices and

served with sticky rice. Further back in history, the ancient Romans considered beetle larvae to be gourmet

fare, and the Old Testament mentions eating crickets and grasshoppers. In the 20th century, the Japanese

emperor Hirohito's favorite meal was a mixture of cooked rice, canned wasps (including larvae, pupae and

adults), soy sauce and sugar.

Will Westerners ever take to insects as food? It's possible. We

John S. Dykes

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Recipe: Crispy Crickets

Preheat the oven to 225 degrees. Strip theantennae, limbs and wings (if any) from 20 to 30clean, frozen adult crickets, or 40 to 60 cricketnymphs. Spread the stripped crickets on a lightlyoiled baking sheet and place in oven. Bake untilcrickets are crisp, around 20 minutes. Yield: onecup.

Sprinkle these on salads or put them through acoffee grinder to turn them into bug "flour." Youcould even combine the crickets with Chex Mixfor a protein-rich snack.

From "The Eat-a-Bug Cookbook" by DavidGeorge Gordon (Ten Speed Press)

are entomologists at Wageningen University, and we started

promoting insects as food in the Netherlands in the 1990s.

Many people laughed—and cringed—at first, but interest

gradually became more serious. In 2006 we created a

"Wageningen—City of Insects" science festival to promote the

idea of eating bugs; it attracted more than 20,000 visitors.

Over the past two years, three Dutch insect-raising companies,

which normally produce feed for animals in zoos, have set up

special production lines to raise locusts and mealworms for

human consumption. Now those insects are sold, freeze-dried,

in two dozen retail food outlets that cater to restaurants. A few

restaurants in the Netherlands have already placed insects on

the menu, with locusts and mealworms (beetle larvae) usually

among the dishes.

Insects have a reputation for being dirty and carrying diseases

—yet less than 0.5% of all known insect species are harmful to

people, farm animals or crop plants. When raised under

hygienic conditions—eating bugs straight out of the backyard

generally isn't recommended—many insects are perfectly safe

to eat.

Meanwhile, our food needs are on the rise. The human

population is expected to grow from six billion in 2000 to nine

billion in 2050. Meat production is expected to double in the same period, as demand grows from rising wealth.

Pastures and fodder already use up 70% of all agricultural land, so increasing livestock production would

require expanding agricultural acreage at the expense of rain forests and other natural lands. Officials at the

United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization recently predicted that beef could become an extreme

luxury item by 2050, like caviar, due to rising production costs.

Raising insects for food would avoid many of the problems associated with livestock. For instance, swine and

humans are similar enough that they can share many diseases. Such co-infection can yield new disease strains

that are lethal to humans, as happened during a swine fever outbreak in the Netherlands in the late 1990s.

Because insects are so different from us, such risks are accordingly lower.

Insects are also cold-blooded, so they don't need as much feed as animals like pigs and cows, which consume

more energy to maintain their body temperatures. Ten pounds of feed yields one pound of beef, three pounds

of pork, five pounds of chicken and up to six pounds of insect meat.

Insects produce less waste, too. The proportion of livestock that is not edible after processing is 30% for pork,

35% for chicken, 45% for beef and 65% for lamb. By contrast, only 20% of a cricket is inedible.

Raising insects requires relatively little water, especially as

compared to the production of conventional meat (it takes

more than 10 gallons of water, for instance, to produce about

two pounds of beef). Insects also produce far less ammonia and

other greenhouse gases per pound of body weight. Livestock is

responsible for at least 10% of all greenhouse gas emissions.

Raising insects is more humane as well. Housing cattle, swine

or chicken in high densities causes stress to the animals, but

insects like mealworms and locusts naturally like to live in

dense quarters. The insects can be crowded into vertical

stacked trays or cages. Nor do bug farms have to be restricted

Mitchell Fienberg

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Worms, crickets, dung beetles -- to most people they'rejust creepy craw lers. To Brooklyn painter and artprofessor Marc Dennis, they're yummy ingredients forhis Bug Dinners.

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to rural areas; they could sprout up anywhere, from a suburban strip mall to an apartment building.

Enterprising gourmets could even keep a few trays of mealworms in the garage to ensure a fresh supply.

The first insect fare is likely to be incorporated subtly into dishes, as a replacement for meat in meatballs and

sauces. It also can be mixed into prepared foods to boost their nutritional value—like putting mealworm paste

into a quiche. And dry-roasted insects can be used as a replacement for nuts in baked goods like cookies and

breads.

We continue to make progress in the Netherlands, where the

ministry of agriculture is funding a new $1.3 million research

program to develop ways to raise edible insects on food waste,

such as brewers' grain (a byproduct of beer brewing), soyhulls

(the skin of the soybean) and apple pomace (the pulpy remains

after the juice has been pressed out). Other research is focusing

on how protein could be extracted from insects and used in

processed foods.

Though it is true that intentionally eating insects is common

only in developing countries, everyone already eats some

amount of insects. The average person consumes about a

pound of insects per year, mostly mixed into other foods. In the U.S., most processed foods contain small

amounts of insects, within limits set by the Food and Drug Administration. For chocolate, the FDA limit is 60

insect fragments per 100 grams. Peanut butter can have up to 30 insect parts per 100 grams, and fruit juice can

have five fruit-fly eggs and one or two larvae per 250 milliliters (just over a cup). We also use many insect

products to dye our foods, such as the red dye cochineal in imitation crab sticks, Campari and candies. So we're

already some of the way there in making six-legged creatures a regular part of our diet.

Not long ago, foods like kiwis and sushi weren't widely known or available. It is quite likely that in 2020 we will

look back in surprise at the era when our menus didn't include locusts, beetle larvae, dragonfly larvae, crickets

and other insect delights.

—Mr. Dicke and Mr. Van Huis are professors of entomology at Wageningen University in the Netherlands.

Mitchell Fienberg

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