Your Kids Will Probably Eat Bugs
Trust me on this, because I’ve done the experiment: kids will eat food-grade insects if given the chance. My kids and their friends think the idea of a packet of BBQ-flavour crickets is absolutely hilarious, and a lollipop with a scorpion in the middle the height of cultural rebellion.
Ironically, these two examples are among the worst ways to actually eat insects. The crickets are dry and scratchy and have a weird “dead insect” aftertaste that reminds me of the smell of a Commodore’s front grille after a day on the road. And the scorpion-pop is just a regular, tooth-shattering slab of boiled sugar with a terrible, crumbly, stale-tasting not-beef jerky centre.
Both products exist as stunt-snacks of course, their purpose is to shock, not actually taste good. They play an important role in letting people know that in the future, much of our food protein will necessarily have to come from a source other than cows, sheep, pigs, chickens... and all those novelty animals that seem to exist solely so butchers can charge thrice the price for a third the meat (looking at you, rabbit).
That’s right: we will almost definitely have to turn to insects to feed a global population of nine billion. All our mass-produced meat is bad, but cattle are the worst. A chicken needs about 34 litres of water per gram of protein produced, while a cow needs 112 litres. Cows also need four times as much feed per kilo. Bugs, it seems, need a fifth the water, a tenth the feed, and a mere sliver of the land, by comparison.
Meat is an awkward thing, because if you’re a pre-technological culture living on the primordial Earth, killing a bison is an enormously more e cient way to get calorie-dense, nutrient-rich food than nibbling on 700 kilograms of yams.
But in a high-population, high-tech society where you personally don’t need to factor in energy expended catching your T-bone, meat is economically disastrous. In net terms, that is, because it simply costs too much, in resources, to make a kilogram of meat. And it takes up too much land.
Today, in a world that has the technology to stock a supermarket with seventeen di erent types of mushroom, and every cultivar of every food crop ever developed, you can absolutely be a vegetarian and not die of malnutrition.
But humans have evolved to best thrive (as opposed to merely eke out an existence) on a diet that contains protein-dense food like meat. Could we convert our entire civilisation to vegetarianism? Maybe not: There are still questions around whether kids can develop properly on plants alone, even if you’re force-feeding them beans at every meal. So, we “need” animal-based food. And to make it even harder, the problems with traditional meat go beyond resource consumption to ethical questions about relative self-awareness, especially of pigs (and have you seen those YouTube videos of cows playing fetch?).
Insects avoid many of these problems. The debate over a cricket’s right to not be ground up and made into pasta will no doubt continue, but at least in the meantime it doesn’t take a hectare of land and enough water to keep hundreds of humans alive to grow that cricket. Also, unlike cows, crickets like living in small, dark, humid boxes with lots of other crickets.
Anyway, the point is that when insect-based food finally gets some momentum, making your kids to eat the bugs may not be much of a challenge. Kids, it seems, love to eat bugs.
After all, nothing generates playground cred quicker than a shiny packet of mealworms.