 |
| Read the interesting blog which will convince you to at least try to eat something new |
Insects are usually related to nature and dirt. Hoe
surprising to hear that the Dutch Queen-to-be
was recently handed-over an insect cook book.
The number of people on earth keeps growing while there also
is an expansion of people which could afford to live a Western lifestyle. This
means more cars, more travel, more meat on the plates and thus more CO2
emissions.
Researchers concluded that we cannot continue eating as much
meat as we do now. It is too energy consuming to grow cows, pigs, chicken and
any other four legged animal. Growing animals is not very efficient way of
making food for humans. The animals need liters of water and kilo’s of food
each day. And the food has to grow somewhere and transported to another. The
more energy, water and soil we need for the animals, the less we have for
ourselves.
Since this problem is expected already some years
specialists started to look for alternatives. Food which helps us to get the
right nutrients but avoids all the energy use. If you don’t want to eat meat
you already have the choice to eat tofu, beans and eggs or (if you live in
Holland) a piece of ‘meat’ from the Vegetarian Butcher. But now there is something different available: insects.
In some cultures insects are not an unusual aspect of dinner
at all; 80% of the world eats them as a delicacy. In Mexico people love to eat
ants, in Japan wasps are favorites on the menu. But Europeans don’t really seem
to be attracted to eat these. To convince us of the possibilities, two
academics and a chef made a book full of information and of course delicious
recipes with the sustainable meat substitutes.
If this book can really make us to eat less meat it could
mean a big change in the way agriculture is organized now. At this moment
farmers mainly seem to look for more efficient kinds of growing plants and
animals to be sure we can all eat what we want. This leads to an unhealthy way
of producing food in which landscapes are dominated with monotonous crops and
animals never see daylight. The bug industry could change this into more traditional
landscapes filled with cows and pigs and grown with a diversity of crops.
