Cynthia Witthoft - The World's Wildest Delicacies

Cynthia Witthoft
Song: The World's Wildest Delicacies -

Entomophagy is the practice of eating insects as food. Entomophagy is seen in a large number of taxonomic groups including insects (that eat other insects), birds and mammals.
The term is also used to describe human insect-eating that is common in some cultures in parts of the world including Central and South America, Africa, Asia and Australia, but uncommon and even taboo in some societies.
History of human entomophagy
Before humans had tools to hunt or practice agriculture, insects must have represented an important part of their diet. Evidence of this has been found by analyzing coprolites from caves in USA and Mexico. Coprolites in caves in the Ozark Mountains were found to contain ants, beetle larvae, lice, ticks and mites.
Cave paintings in Altamira, north Spain, dated to about 9,000 to 30,000 BCE, depict the collection of wild bee nests. At the time people must have eaten bee pupae and larvae with the honey. Cocoons of wild silkworm (Theophilia religiosae) were found in ruins in the Shanxi province of China, dating from 2,00 to 2,500 years B.C. The cocoons had large holes in them, suggesting the pupae were eaten. Many ancient entomophagy practices have been passed down to the present, forming traditional entomophagy.
Entomophagy can be divided into two categories: insects used as nutrients source and others as condiments. Some insects are eaten as larvae, others as adults. Over 1200 species of insects are used as food by people throughout the world. Commonly eaten insects and arachnids include grasshoppers, crickets, termites, ants, beetle larvae (grubs), moth caterpillars and pupae, spiders, tarantulas, and scorpions.
Insects generally have a higher food conversion efficiency than more traditional meats. For example, studies concerning the house cricket (Acheta domesticus), when reared at 30°C or more and fed a diet of equal quality to the diet used to rear conventional livestock, show a food conversion twice as efficient as pigs and broiler chicks, four times that of sheep, and six times higher than steers when losses in carcass trim and dressing percentage are counted.
Further, insects reproduce at a faster rate than beef animals. A female cricket can lay from 1,200 to 1,500 in 3 to 4 weeks, while for beef the ratio is four breeding animals for each market animal produced, thus giving house crickets a true food conversion efficiency almost 20 times higher than beef. For this reason and because of the essential amino acids content of insects, some people 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 animal protein. This makes insect meat more ecological than vertebrate meat.