It may seem like an unlikely spot, but in a converted Welsh farmhouse outside St Davids, chefs are reimagining the way we eat.

For the past three years, Britain’s first insect cafe, the Grub Kitchen, has been serving up a menu of cricket pakoras, grasshopper arabiatta, burgers made of mealworms and grub-fried chicken, or GFC.

If a diet of fried creepy-crawlies sounds unappetising, there are plenty of experts who believe this and other protein-based alternatives - including cultured or lab-grown meat and bio-engineered dairy products - represent the future of food.

With the world’s population on track to exceed 9 billion people by 2050, alternative proteins will be essential to feed growing numbers of hungry mouths as rising demand heaps extra pressure on land and resources, they say.

So will grasshoppers and lab-grown beef really be what will be served up at mealtimes in 20 years' time?

Dr. Patrick Brown, founder of Impossible Foods, a food tech start-up backed by Bill Gates which has raised $400m to produce next-generation burgers, certainly thinks so.

This month, he called the rise of meat consumption that has accompanied rapid population growth as a “rocket ship to environmental apocalypse”, adding that his goal was to “completely replace animals in the food system”.