While browsing the various sources I follow on Tumblr, I found an article that quite caught my attention : 7 insects you’ll be eating in the future. The article explains the nutritional values of bugs and how some experts believe we’ll have to resort to this.
While I am fully aware that people from several regions of the world do eat insects – caterpillars in Africa, grasshoppers in Mexico… – I am not quite sure that most people from the Western world would eat such kinds of food.
Neither am I sure that we actually would have to resort to this to feed ourselves. Solving some of our more urgent problems would have much bigger impact.
We have a lot of problems with food :
- We produce huge amounts of quantities that are just thrown away at the various stages of production ;
- Some eat way too much while others just don’t have enough on their plates to live healthy lives ;
- We consume just too much junk and meat to be healty…
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Here are some explanations of the afore mentioned facts :
We have seen it in many articles for the past few years, up to a third of the food we produce goes to landfills uneaten. Food waste is a huge problem that has to be addressed before anything else is tried.
Indeed, letting 1.3 billion tonnes of food per year to rot has staggering costs in terms of money and greenhouse gases emissions. Here also, efficiency is key.
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If staying slim is good for the environment, more and more people are becoming obese. This takes place as there are now more overweight and obese people that undernourished.
In fact, over a billion people are overfed and an additional 300 million people are literally obese. This has to be compared to the 842 million people who are underfed. There also, something has to be done.
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The Western world eats just to much meat and junk. A consequence of this, horse meat has been discovered in frozen lasagna from a famous European brand and many other related scandals have spread last year.
Eating less meat than we currently do and choosing ones that have a lower carbon impact would do wonders for both our personal and global wealth.
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Well, you must have understood it by now, I am not ready to eat insects to feed myself. I eat much less meat and junk than before, I keep a healthy weight by not overeating and am doing a lot of exercise and I very seldom waste food.
While I could do even better – go fully vegetarian – I consider that I am doing enough for the moment and have to admit that while eating vegetarian dinners from time to time, I don’t see myself quitting eating the occasional steack and fries…
