Energy-efficient food production to reduce global warming and ecodegradation: The use of edible insects

As the global population continues to rise, and attempts to increase arable land area come in sharp conflict with the necessity to retain forests on one hand and pressures of urbanization on the other, the wave of global food shortage that has hit the world recently is likely to hit us again and again. The increasing pressure on land is making meat production from macro-livestock less sustainable than ever before. To add to the diminishing pastures and broadening demand-supply gap of food grains are the shortages arising due to the diversion of some of the food crops for biofuel production. There is also an increasing use of fodder for generating biomass energy. The result is that even as the demand for animal protein keeps on rising with the swelling global population, there is every possibility that attempts to meet this demand would face serious crises in the coming years. The adverse impacts of global warming are conspiring to make the situation even worse than it otherwise would have been. The present review brings home the fact that one of the possible ways to get around this problem is to extend the practice of entomophagy - use of insects as human food. As of now entomophagy is practiced in some regions and some cultures, but, by-and-large, the bulk of global population stay away from it. It is even looked down in several cultures and forbidden in some others. The review brings out the irrationality of omitting edible insects from human diet given the generally higher quality of nutrition they contain as compared to food based on macro-livestock. This aspect, coupled with much lesser consumption of energy and natural resources associated with insect-based protein production, makes entomophagy an option which deserves urgent global attention. The authors highlight the relatively stronger sustainability of animal protein production by way of insect farming because, pound to pound, the production of insect protein takes much less land and energy than the more widely consumed forms of animal protein. It is estimated that over a thousand insect species are already a part of human diet and the nutrition offered by several of the species matches or surpasses that which is contained in traditional non-vegetarian foods. The paper also deals with the relevance of entomophagy as a potentially more ecologically compatible and sustainable source of animal protein than the red and the white meat on which most of the world presently depends. In the emerging global pattern based on an expanding share of renewable energy sources, entomophagy fits in as a renewable source of food energy for the future. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.