Eating Insects (Entomophagy)

I've always be interested in Eating Insects. My brother got a cook book just for eating Insects.
Here is a little information about it straight from Wikipedia.

A total of 1417 species of insects have been recorded as being eaten by over 3000 ethnic groups. These include 235 species of butterflies and moths, 344 species of beetles, 313 species of ants, bees and wasps as well as 239 species of grasshoppers, crickets and cockroaches, amongst others. Other commonly eaten insects are termites, cicadas and dragonflies.

Though my brothers cook book only uses a few different kinds, mostly Grasshoppers and Crickets.

Insects can be a good source of not only protein, but also vitamins, minerals, and fats. For example, crickets are high in calcium, and termites are rich in iron. One hundred grams of giant silkworm moth larvae provide 100 percent of the daily requirements for copper, zinc, iron, thiamin, and riboflavin. Ants can also contain protein depending on the size of the insect. The smaller the species, the greater the chance of it containing minimal or no protein. Grubs of the sago palm weevil (a staple in Papua New Guinea) are laden with unsaturated fat. Many insects contain abundant stores of lysine, an amino acid deficient in the diets of many people who depend heavily on grain.


The intentional cultivation of arthropods for human food, referred to as minilivestock, is now emerging in animal husbandry as an ecologically sound concept. Minilivestocking suggests that a wide variety of small animals, include arthropods, be reared as nutritious food, the major advantage being that they do not have to be fed on grains thus saving many crop species for human consumption. It is also concerned to be much more ecologically friendly than traditional livestocking.^[24]
Insects generally have a higher food conversion efficiency than more traditional meats, measured as efficiency of conversion of ingested food, or ECI.^[25] While many insects can have an energy input to protein output ratio of around 4:1, raised livestock has a ratio closer to 54:1.^[26] This is partially due to the fact that feed first needs to be grown for most traditional livestock. Additionally endothermic (warm-blooded) vertebrates need to use a significantly greater amount of energy just to stay warm whereas ectothermic (cold blooded) plants or insects do not.^[27] An index which can be used as a measure is the Efficiency of conversion of ingested food to body substance: for example, only 10% of ingested food is converted to body substance by beef cattle, versus 19–31% by silkworms and 44% by German cockroaches. Studies concerning the house cricket (Acheta domesticussteers (oxen) when losses in carcass trim and dressing percentage are counted.^[10]

Insects reproduce at a faster rate than beef animals. A female cricket can lay from 1,200 to 1,500 eggs in three to four weeks, while for beef the ratio is four breeding animals for each market animal produced. This gives house crickets a true food conversion efficiency almost 20 times higher than beef.^[10] For this reason and because of the essential amino acids content of insects, some people, on ecological grounds, propose the development of entomophagy to provide a major source of protein in human nutrition. Protein production for human consumption would be more effective and consume fewer resources than vertebrate protein. This makes insect meat more ecological than vertebrate meat.
Insects have attractive qualities for food production besides their high energy efficiency. For example the spatial usage and water requirements are only a fraction of that required to produce the same mass of food with cattle farming. Production of 150g of grasshopper meat requires only very little water, while cattle requires 3290 liters to produce the same amount of beef.^[

More on this soon to come.
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