Fried and dusted with chili lime or nacho spice, they don’t taste much different from say, corn nuts or extra crispy shrimp. In the taste stakes, crickets still come up short. “But we have to be able to put them in a form that is acceptable to different cultures and different societies.” I mean, honestly, why wouldn’t we use them?” she says. Agnes Kalibata, the UN Secretary-General António Guterres’ special envoy for the 2021 Food Systems Summit, says that farming insects could provide an elegant solution to the intertwined crises of climate change, biodiversity loss, hunger and malnutrition. Not only do insects produce less waste, their excrement, called frass, is an excellent fertilizer and soil amender. Insect farming and processing produces significantly lower greenhouse gas emissions. Yet pound for pound they require less land, water and feed than traditional livestock. Grasshoppers, crickets and mealworms are rich in protein, and contain significantly higher sources of minerals such as iron, zinc, copper, and magnesium than beef. There is a sustainable alternative to going meat-free, the FAO says: edible insects. Decreasing meat production, says the report, would remove pressure to expand livestock operations while freeing up existing land to restore native ecosystems and increase biodiversity. Yet agriculture is one of the biggest drivers of natural destruction, threatening 86% of the 28,000 species most at risk of extinction, according to a new report by the UK-based policy institute Chatham House and the UN environment program.ĭemand for animal protein in particular is increasing the strain on the environment: 80% of the world’s farmland is used to raise and feed livestock, even though animals only account for 18% of global calorie consumption. The United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organization says that agricultural production worldwide will have to increase by 70% in order to feed a global population expected to reach 9.1 billion by 2050. In seeking to protect Madagascar’s forests, Fisher and Hugel may have found a solution to one of the world’s most pressing problems. “It changed my life,” he says via video chat from his home in France. Three years later, he laughs at the memory of his first foray into entomophagy. It took three attempts before he could relax enough to actually taste, chew and swallow the cricket. He started with a roasted, salted cricket. But the psychological barriers were equally high. He knew that crickets were healthy, and that they were high in protein, iron and vitamin B-12. Surely Hugel, with his vast knowledge of Indian Ocean crickets, could help identify a local species that would be easy to farm, and, more importantly, might taste good?įor Hugel, his scientific curiosity competed with squeamishness. Crickets, which are high in protein and other vital nutrients, were already being farmed successfully in Canada for both human and animal consumption. If there were a way to turn that occasional snack into a regular meal by making it easily available, it could help ease pressure on the island’s threatened forests. More than two-thirds of Madagascar’s population already eat insects in some form, usually as a seasonal snack. “If you want to be able to keep studying your insects, we need to increase food security, otherwise there will be no forest left,” Fisher wrote. The only way to prevent this, Fisher told Hugel in his emails, was to give locals an alternative source of protein. Nearly 80% of Madagascar’s forest coverage has been destroyed since the 1950s, and 1-2% of what remains is cut down each year as farmers clear more trees to make room for livestock. Fisher had been doing fieldwork in Madagascar when he realized that the forests where both he and Hugel conducted much of their research were disappearing. “I’m working to protect those insects, not eat them,” the French academic responded tartly.īut the emails from Brian Fisher, an ant specialist at the California Academy of Sciences, in San Francisco, kept coming. So when he received an email from a fellow entomologist in March 2017 asking for help identifying a species in Madagascar that could be farmed for humans to consume, he thought it was a joke. Sylvain Hugel is one of the world’s foremost experts on crickets of the Indian Ocean Islands.
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