[Transcript] - AsapSCIENCE- Should we all be eating insects?

AsapSCIENCE - Should We All Be Eating Insects

Many people find the very thought of insects disgusting especially when they are in your mouth, but have you ever considered that insects could be more nutritious, environmentally friendly and abundant than most other foods. Should we all be eating insects?

Compare 100 grams of crickets to 100 grams of chicken, beef or pork and you will find that they have comparable protein content, but crickets are much higher in essential vitamins and minerals such as calcium, zinc and iron. Similarly insects like mealworms are low in fat and contain large amounts of fiber.

But that’s not the only reason to incorporate them into your diet, currently there are 1.53 billion hectares of cropland and 3.38 billion hectares of pasture’s covering our earth. Essentially 38% of the land you see on a map is used for agriculture and farming, but where it takes 200 square meters of land to grow one pound of beef, it only takes 15 squares meters to grow one pound of crickets.

Furthermore by 2025, it’s expected that 1.8 billion people will live in areas with little to no fresh water. And yet 70% of our freshwater sources are used in agriculture alone. To produce 1 kilogram of beef it takes 22,000 liters of water, whereas 1 kilogram of pork takes 3,500 liters and 1 kilogram of chicken takes 2,300 liters. But to make 1 kilogram of crickets, it only requires one liter of water, this is because insects can become fully hydrated just from the food that they eat. They are also more digestible, in fact 80% of a cricket is edible and digestible compared to 50% of a chicken and 40% of cattle.

And it’s not like our mouths have never tasted insects before. For every 100 grams of spinach, 50 small insects like aphids, thrips and mites are permitted. Peanut butter is allowed to contain roughly 30 insect fragments such as heads, bodies or legs per 100 grams.

And even the hops used to make your favorite beer can contain 250 aphids per 100 grams. Yep your summer beer maybe spiked with a little more bug juice than you anticipated. So why aren't we eating insects? They are actually consumed in some parts of Asia, Latin America and Africa. In fact the capital of Congo has households eating, 300 grams of caterpillars a week, which is 96 tons of caterpillars every year. But much of the western world is used to screaming in disgust if they find a bug in their salad.

This maybe because western culinary traditions have spawned out of colder climates with less insects, increased farming and larger animals to eat. As Europeans began to colonize the world. They contextualized bug eating as savage and primitive because they observed many indigenous people doing it.

Little that they know bugs are actually extremely nutritious. But well the idea of eating insects may literally be hard to swallow as recipes are created insect processing food technology evolves and our mindsets adopt. Maybe insects will become the super food of the future. Look out Greek yogurt and Kale they are some new kids in town. We actually challenged ourselves to chop down on bugs try out a few recipes and eat things like cookies and snack bars using insect flower in our latest AsapTHOUGHT video.

We also discussed the role and potential for insects in helping to solve world’s hunger. Make sure to click the screen or the link in the description below to check it out. And subscribe for more weekly science videos.