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If you were told you had to choose a protein alternate to beef, you might choose chicken, pork or even peanut butter or lentils. Chances are if you had to provide a list of your top 25 protein choices after beef, insects wouldn’t be on it. But that’s exactly what the UK’s Waste and Resources Action Programme (Wrap) is suggesting we eat, according to The Guardian.
I don’t know about you, but if I’m brought a plate of grasshoppers and crickets I’m not going to eat it—and I probably wouldn’t go back to wherever I was served them. Wrap admits that persuading people like me to utilize insects as an environmentally friendly protein alternative will be difficult.
“Novel foods in Western diets will incorporate insects to some degree, in a similar way to the spread of sushi from Japan in 2000s, but the major growth will be for feed to livestock,” the Wrap said in a report, according to The Guardian. Wrap’s Director of Sustainable Food Systems, Richard Swannell, told The Guardian that because available land will be hard to come by in the coming years, alternative protein resources that reduce land use should be looked into. Besides insects, Swannell recommends eating more seaweed, which contains “65-90% protein.”
While it is not stated how much seaweed is currently being consumed, Swannell told The Guardian that “ground cricket flour is already being used as a protein source in North America.” (I must double-check my flour when I get home.)
Can you picture yourself including insects in your daily diet as an alternative to meat?
Click here to read the report in full.
