Researchers Predict $160 Big Macs and Shift to Insect Burgers

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Head researcher Arnold Van Huis told a disbelieving audience at Wageningen University in the Netherlands: “There will come a day when a Big Mac costs $163 and more people will eat insects than other meat” in Bug Macs.

The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization predicts there will be nine billion people on the planet by 2050. The world is quite simply running out of the massive amounts of agricultural land necessary to raise cattle.

Van Huis assembled about 200 tasters as guinea pigs for a group of Dutch scientists doing novel research into insects replacing animal meat as source of protein.

The 200 tasters feasted on a selection of Thai marinated grasshopper spring rolls, buffalo worm chocolate gnache, and quiche lorraine with meal worms instead of bacon or ham, all prepared by chef Henk van Gurp.

The university’s head of entomology Marcel Dicke says changing Westerners’ mindset will take more than disguising a worm in chocolate, and warns that Westerners had no choice but to shed their bug bias.

“The question really should be: ‘Why do we NOT eat insects?,” said Dicke, who claims the average person unknowingly eats about 500 grams of bug particles a year anyway — in strawberry jam, bread and other processed foods.

“The problem is here,” Dicke tells AFP, pointing at his head while examining an exhibition featuring a handful of the world’s more than 1,200 edible insect species including worms, gnats, wasps, termites and beetles.

“We have to eat less meat or find an alternative,” said Dicke, who claims to sit down to a family meal of insects on a regular basis.

Wageningen University researchers are preparing for what Vandana Shiva discussed over a decade ago in Stolen Harvest, (South End Press, 2000), pp. 70-71: “Intensive breeding of livestock and poultry for…[fast food] restaurants leads to deforestation, land degradation, and contamination of water sources and other natural resources.

“Overall, animal farms use nearly 40 percent of the world’s total grain production. In the United States, nearly 70 percent of grain production is fed to livestock.”

Raising cattle not only requires land for pastures and grazing, but land is also required to grow grain to feed cattle, and overgrazing leads to land degradation, top soil loss, and water wastage.

As Anup Shah points out on his website Global Issues, “With industrial agriculture, more petrochemicals are used. More energy is required to create fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides, etc, to grow the grain that is used to feed cattle.

“Deforestation of large amounts of forests, including the Amazon, has occurred due to timber industries, industrial agriculture and also meat industry/cattle grazing.

According to Richard Robbins, Global Problems and the Culture of Capitalism, (Allyn and Bacon, 1999), p.220, “Hundreds of thousands of acres of tropical forests in Brazil, Guatemala, Costa Rica, and Honduras, to name just a few countries, have been leveled to create pasture for cattle.”

Head researcher Van Huis claims 500 types of insects are eaten in Mexico, 250 in Africa and 180 in China and other parts of Asia.

And as AFP writer Mariette le Roux points out, the university’s research emphasizes that bugs are high in protein, low in fat and efficient to cultivate — 10 kilograms (22 pounds) of feed yields six to eight kilograms of insect meat compared to one kilogram of beef, states the university’s research.

Additionally, say the researchers, insects are abundant, produce less greenhouse gas and manure, and do not transfer any diseases, when eaten, that can mutate into a dangerous human form.

Mariette le Roux also notes that three species — meal worms, buffalo worms and grasshoppers — are cultivated by three farmers in the Netherlands for a small but growing group of adventurous foodies.

For those squeamish about eating insects, Wageningen University is conducting research into extracting insect protein for use in food products.

“We want to determine if we can texturise it to resemble meat, like they do with soy,” said Marian Peters, secretary of the Dutch insect breeders association, who is also experimenting with a pinkish powder that is protein taken from meal worms she hopes will one day be a common pizza ingredient.

Farm owner Roland van de Ven produces 1,200kg of meal worms a week of which one or two percent for human consumption, the rest as animal feed. When you see an insect, it is a barrier, says Roland. “I think people will come around if the insects are processed and not visible in food.”

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