Entomophagy - Tumblr Posts
Bugs have also long been considered a delicacy throughout history. Locusts were served at royal banquets in Nineveh in the eighth century BCE. Aristotle wrote about eating cicadas in Historia Animalium, and Pliny the Elder wrote that Roman aristocrats dined on beetle larvae. Today, insects supplement the diets of two billion people worldwide.
And for good reason. Insects are delicious, nutritious, and abundant. In 2013, the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) published a report endorsing the inclusion of insects in a daily diet as a sustainable and nutritious alternative to other meat.
The average protein content of edible insects is higher than plant protein sources, and at the upper range—higher than that of meat and eggs. Though the nutritional value of insects varies widely between species, the FAO report found that, on average, they are an excellent source of micronutrients, amino acids, and B vitamins (among a long list of health benefits).
Eating insects is far more sustainable than relying on the resource-intensive factory-farming favored in this country—all over the world, forests are destroyed to make room for livestock. Cattle ranching accounts for about 80 percent of total deforestation in the Amazon region, and the release of 340 million tons of carbon to the atmosphere every year. Insects, not surprisingly, are highly efficient at converting biomass into protein, requiring far less land and water.