There’s another food revolution coming. And it isn’t a quiet one. It’s practically buzzing. And clicking. And crunching. It’s almost orchestral, really, in a tinny, droning sort of way. That’s right: an increasing number of scientists suggest that if we’re to support our booming population in the coming decades, we must turn to new sources of protein, namely, in the form of insects. If the leaps in grain production in the late 1960s—attributable to genetic engineering and improved agricultural techniques—constituted a Green Revolution, this is a protein revolution. It’s not going to go down easy, not in the Western world at least. Though residents of equatorial countries have long availed themselves of the protein-rich flesh of insects, Westerners usually still find their gorges rising at the thought of ingesting a single bug, let alone a risotto studded with them. The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations (UN) wants to find ways around this squeamishness. In doing so, it turned to a cadre of entomologists, food scientists, and other experts, who issued a report on the subject in 2013. Notably, the report emphasized that raising insects for food uses substantially fewer resources than raising large vertebrate livestock. The lead author, entomologist Arnold van Huis, says, “Crickets, grasshoppers and locusts are my favorites, in particular when they are nicely cooked and seasoned. Deep-fried, they can also become nicely crunchy.”
The Bug-Eyed Quiz