Is Eating Insects the Key to Saving the Planet?

Is Eating Insects the Key to Saving the Planet? - Daria Mundy (Oakwood School, 12th Grade)

I recently dove into a lot of research about ways people are using their diets to help with climate change. It may sound strange and grotesque, but I stumbled upon a lot of work about eating insects. I think that in theory, eating insects is a great idea for a multitude of reasons. However, realistically I don’t think I could fully adopt all of these practices immediately. 

I am ready to eat insects but not necessarily substitute my entire diet with them. Small substitutions are something that I would be open to. For example, using cricket flour instead of regular flour. The pros of "eating insects to save the world" is that people can get protein without wasting any parts of the animal. Breeding or mass production would not be as detrimental to the environment as it is to breed cows. Insects require very little land, food, and water. It could help with world hunger and climate change.

 However, It assumes that every member of society is interested in saving the world. It also assumes that all people eat food merely for protein and not for pleasure. Some people eat food not to “save the world” but because they are passionate about food and I doubt they would want to only eat insects for the rest of their lives. One food my family eats a lot is Horesh (Iranian potato stew). The dish consists of a beef and lentil stew topped with french fries. Maybe we could use a more meaty insect as a beef substitute and fried insects for fries. This might be hard to make the first time but I don't think it would make the process any more difficult than usual. I doubt people would accept it especially because it is such a traditional dish. People tend to fear the unknown and wouldn't want to change traditional and cultural food. People in my culture don’t eat pork because it is considered dirty so I can’t imagine what they would think about eating insects. 

I think that the things that would have to change for me to eat insects practically would be accessibility and stigma. I wouldn't be comfortable eating insects in public because people would give me weird stares and be grossed out. Another issue is that you can't find insects in a normal grocery store and there isn't a lot of accessibility for insect eaters. I think that if I saw insects for a reasonable price in the grocery store it would start the process of normalizing the eating of them. I think that the fear of the unknown is one of the biggest reasons that people wouldn’t be open to eating insects. However, once people learned about the benefits of eating insects, and started being exposed to it more, perhaps they would become a bit more accepting of insects in our diets. 

If we could somehow slowly incorporate insects into people's daily lives in small ways, the stigma would probably break down. Education is another way to break the stigma. People are grossed out by the idea of it because they don’t know the facts. I think if everyone in the world had the education that I received from this research, they would be much more open to eating insects.