It's cricket crumble for dinner. We should all be eating more insects, because doing so is better for the planet than tucking into conventional meat like beef.
In a new report entitled "Edible Insects: Future prospects for food and feed security",
the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) says that farmed insects
could make a big contribution to our diets – they contain lots of
protein and are cheap to produce. They also have major environmental
benefits.
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Conventional meat is not an efficient
way to get nutrients because animals must be fed on crops, and much of
the energy that goes into cultivating the crops is wasted. To produce 1
kilogram of beef, for example, you need 10 kg of feed, whereas 1 kg of
crickets requires just 1.7 kg. What's more, 80 per cent of a cricket is
edible compared with just 40 per cent of a cow.
The FAO therefore calculates that
crickets are 12 times as efficient at converting feed into meat as cows.
By farming insects, we could get more meat from the same amount of
grain, use less land for agriculture and cut pollution.
good
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