If edible insect are the future, use should talk about poop

TWO BILLION PEOPLE can’t be wrong—at least, not about the nearly 2,000 species of insects that make for good eatin’ around the world. But nobody has to pitch you on the benefits of insectivory, right? Easier on the environment, full of weird nutrients, and whoa, check out that feed conversion ratio: It takes half as much food as you’d give to pigs and chickens and a twelfth as much as cattle to get the same amount of cricket protein on the far side of the abattoir. If Earth might have to feed 9 billion people in the coming decades, insects are what’s for dinner. Ask the United Nations.

Insects for dinner?

But let’s slow down this Snowpiercer train a bit. Insects like crickets and beetles are, indeed, a very good source of protein and other nutrients. But the ones that humans already eat tend to be wild-caught and consumed in comparatively small numbers. That’s not the scaled-up future of insectivory that the UN foresaw in 2013. Factory farm facilities that can breed, raise, kill, and ship millions of critters require more food as input, output more waste, and raise thorny issues from entomology to ethics. “Actually, we don’t know that much,” says Åsa Berggren, an ecologist at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences in Uppsala who has been trying to sort out how sustainable an insect-based menu would be. “And people don’t know what we don’t know.”

Read the story from Wired by Adam Rogers - “If edible insect are the future, use should talk about poop."