The Importance Of Animal Food

1481 Words6 Pages
Cows, chickens, pigs, lambs, fish, crickets. “Crickets!” You might ask, “What do all of these animals have to do with each other?” The answer is, they are all food. “Food? How can cricket's be food?” The idea or thought of eating insects (entomophagy) might sound surprising to you now but you should start getting used to hearing about it. Mark Twain, a famous American author and humorist, once said, “The secret to success in life is to eat what you like and let the food fight it out inside.” But with huge price increases and shortages of raw resources to produce food, especially meat products, it will not be long until the world runs out of what it likes eating now though. Imagine sitting there at your dinner table and the table is all set…show more content…
They require a lot of attention, caring, and cleaning up their waste is not a very appealing task to anyone. But, when one is raising insects, giving them care is less important and not a priority at all compared to cows or pigs. They don’t need as much food or water and the space they would occupy is just a minute fraction compared to other farm animals like cows, pigs, or chickens. To really see how little land and care insects need to raise them, here are some numbers. Cows need about a hundred pounds of food to produce ten pounds of beef, while an edible and raisable species of insect like the cricket only needs a hundred pounds to produce four times as much product, which is around forty pounds of meat. That is enough to feed at least eighty people! Cows also need a large, healthy amount of land to grow. Approximately two hundred square meters to generate one pound of beef, while crickets only need fifteen square meters to make that same amount with less feed. One of the primary reasons that most insects do not need as much feed to produce the exact amount of meat is because insects do not have body warmth, so compared to other animals who do need to consume food and energy to keep their body heat at an acceptable temperatures, insects do not need as much food to use to maintain body…show more content…
Unfortunately, there is really no store that you can go to to buy insects meant for human consumption. Sure you could fry that caterpillar crawling on that branch in your backyard, but the risk is ingesting pesticides through the wild insects which could potentially hurt you. Susan Lawler, head of the Department of Environmental Management and Ecology at La Trobe University wrote in an article about why eating insects are good, saying In fact, it is difficult to find many disadvantages to eating insects. We don’t even have to get over our aversion to biting into a crunchy morsel with too many legs. Factories are already growing insects to produce protein powders which can be used to supplement foods we already enjoy. The only downside I could find is that eating fresh insects collected in the wild puts you at risk of consuming pesticides....– we [do] not have any insects from a trusted source.
Open Document