You might be wondering what all the buzz around edible insects is and asking yourself why it is gaining momentum and being talked about more and more. In truth, eating insects has been done in countries like Asia for decades, insects make up 80% of their diet but it is only starting to become a buzz topic over in the UK because we are starting to see the benefits of using them as a food source. This is partly because we are faced with a global issue, where we are currently growing our population at a rate which can’t keep up with the food production in our current food production methods. Insects have a much shorter life cycle, if you take the most common edible insect – the House Cricket as an example. Crickets will die just before they become 2 months old, which after taking around 13 days before they hatch from an initial laid egg, means the whole cycle of their life is 8 weeks at most. This combined with how reproductive they are, shows how they are being considered as a future solution as a food source, female crickets will lay 50-100 eggs every 2-3 days for weeks......and they start laying eggs from 8 days old! 100 crickets can become 1 million crickets in a matter of months.

What are the benefits?

1. Nutritional

Insects are high in protein, much more protein than other meats such as chicken, beef and pork.

Based on 100grams

Crickets	Crickets	Beef	Chicken	Pork
Protein	72g	19.4g	19.5g	17g
Calcium	75.7mg	12mg	14mg	6.7mg
Iron	9.5mg	2mg	0.9mg	0.9mg

2. Sustainable

We touched on the this earlier, as I explained how short the life cycle is of the house cricket, allowing you to produce high volumes of them, relatively quickly. Other insects are the same, currently the EU has authorised the following insects for edible consumption:

• Yellow Mealworms (these take 10-12 weeks to reach life cycle)
• Locusta Migratoria (these take 8-10 weeks)
• Acheta Domesticus Crickets (6-8 weeks)

Insects on the whole, like their home to be dark, warm and within contained spaces, what this enables farmers to do is place them into containers which can be stacked on top of one another. For example, within 1 container space, you create a racking system which has 4 stacked up high, this is called vertical farming and enables you to produce thousands of crickets on 1 metre squared piece of land – compare this with beef, chicken and pigs and you can see how they are more sustainable – you can produce so many more on such a small footprint. Insects on the whole, like their home to be dark, warm and within contained spaces, what this enables farmers to do is place them into containers which can be stacked on top of one another. For example, within 1 container space, you create a racking system which has 4 stacked up high, this is called vertical farming and enables you to produce thousands of crickets on 1 metre squared piece of land – compare this with beef, chicken and pigs and you can see how they are more sustainable – you can produce so many more on such a small footprint.