Edible insects have been on my radar for a couple of years now, and this weekend I finally took the plunge. At the UCL Sustainability in our City conference, I came across Horizon Edible Insects, and their offer was too good to miss. Drawn in by the mountains of cookies, I noticed these weren't your bog-standard biscuits - these were meal worm cookies! Better still, they were also selling grow-your-own meal worm farms.
My very own meal worm farm is now sat at home, the adult beetles crawling around in their Tupperware home, and hopefully laying lots of invisible eggs. Next week I'll take out the adults, and a week later, the oatmeal substrate they live in should be full of teeny-tiny, wriggly worms.
Gross? Not at all!
In fact these wonderful wigglers could be one solution to our many environmental and social problems. They are incredibly nutritious (meal worms contain the same amount of omega-3 as fish, and their mineral and protein content is similar to that of meat!), yet require very little feed, and almost no water. For example, crickets require only 2kg of feed for each kg of weight gain. Bearing in mind this feed can be food scraps, which would other wise go into the bin, this is amazing! Switching to insects would give us all the nutrients we need, whilst sparing the huge amounts of land, water and CO2 emissions currently produced in agriculture.
On top of that, many animal welfare issues would be solved. No more cage-farmed meat and bloody abattoirs. Just locally grown, nutritious insects, that when the time comes, they simply go to sleep in the fridge, and then are frozen.
Insects also have the potential to improve human livelihoods. Amongst many other human benefits, they can be produced and harvested in small spaces, and fed on waste, meaning possible income opportunities for the poorest and marginalised people of developing countries. Also, by taking up little space, they can be produced locally, reducing CO2 emissions from transport.
So what's stopping us..? Our seemingly inbuilt disgust of eating insects is merely a societal construct. In other societies crispy fried crickets are viewed the same way as a fresh batch of delicious chips. It is estimated that insects form part of the diet of 2 billion people across the globe, with around 1900 species on the menu.
So go on, start your own meal worm farm, reap the benefits and tell the world how great it is! The more interest there is, the more research will be done, and the better the environment will fare as we slowly switch our diets from four-legged focussed to six-legged...
If you're not yet convinced, follow this blog to see how I'm getting along. In a couple of weeks the eggs will hatch and a month after that, it's crunch time... Please let me know if you have any recipe suggestions!