The viability of crickets as an alternative food source to beef overconsumption

Essay from the year 2016 in the subject Environmental Sciences, , language: English, abstract: Among some of the leading current global issues is world hunger. Many attempts have been made at mitigating or even solving the problem, but progress has been slow. Recently, there has been increasing awareness about eating insects, known as entomophagy, to solve world hunger. In 2008, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations published a report discussing how insects could be the solution to achieve food and feed security. I found the report intriguing, noting that entomophagy now had considerable credibility with the United Nations having thoroughly examined the notion. With entomophagy, I noticed not only global applications with hunger and environmental issues, but also potential local applications in nutrition and economics. I narrowed down the enormous topic of entomophagy to two organisms: the cricket and the cow. I thus investigated the question: Through the lenses of biology and environmental systems, are crickets viable as a solution to counteract the overconsumption of beef to prevent a potential global hunger epidemic?

With different avenues of research, I decided to separately study biology and environmental systems. I found the biological aspect most interesting, but I also recognized the importance of the environmental factor. Biological elements were examined in the first half of the investigation, with focus on nutrition, health risks and efficiency comparisons. Environmental systems elements were covered in the second half by looking at emissions, ecological footprint and impact on nearby ecosystems. Overall, there were noticeable benefits of introducing crickets into the global food industry as a substitute to beef. Not only could they rival beef in nutrition, but also were more efficient and posed little human health risk. In addition, the emissions and ecological footprint imposed by crickets were considerably lower than those of beef, with minimal potential impact on nearby ecosystems.