Eating Insects, for or against?

The insects could become our meal tomorrow, why are they so interesting?

First, their growth requires fewer resources than mammals because they do not produce heat unlike the cow for example, so the majority of what they ingest is used for growth. Thus, 10 kilos of food equals 9 kilos of insects, this is the best production yield.

Moreover, the insects are composed of 60% protein easily assimilated by our organism, they are low in fat and rich in trace elements. Thus, only 100 grams of these animals covers 100% of our daily needs in vitamins and minerals.

As a consequence, insects have nutritional qualities equivalent to those of beef, chicken or fish, but less food is necessary for their production according to what we have just seen.

Now to make a vitamin D cure, no more need for cod liver oil, bee larvae could have ten times more that! But it's not very more appetizing ..

Eating insects is also ecological, it reduces the impact on the environment, first because their breeding does not require deforestation, dewatering or environmental degradation : They are easy to breed and don’t have a big need for water. Secondly , researchers at the University of Wageningen (in the Netherlands) have recently shown that breeding edible insects such as locusts, crickets and mealworms produces much less polluting gases such as methane and nitrate oxide than pig and cattle farms. Producing a kilo of flour worms results in the emission of 10 to 100 times less greenhouse gases than producing one kilo of pork.

Finally, Insects also have the advantage of not having a disease transmissible to humans because we are too far away from them on the evolutionary tree, unlike the animals we consume traditionally. 

However, despite their many advantages these small animals are not harmless. Consumers in Western countries are cautious about exotic products, and they are right because there is not any inventory of all the scientific knowledge on the health risks linked to the consumption of insects, as it is announced by Anses, the National Agency for Public Health Food, the environment and work. ANSES recommends that further research be carried out in order to refine the knowledge and establish lists of insects suitable for consumption at Community level, with a specific framework for breeding and production conditions.

The consumption of insects is indeed potentially dangerous. The risk can be chemical due to the substances manufactured and / or stored in the body of the insect as venoms or pesticide residues. It can also be physical with the presence of hard parts such as the carapace, or Microbial, some insects are carriers of parasites, viruses, bacteria, but the risk is mostly allergenic. Actually, proteins causing allergies, such as myosin or chitin, which are found in mites, crustaceans or molluscs, are thus also present in the insects studied.