Should we be eating insects?

Grasshoppers are popular in Mexican cuisine. Photograph: Getty

Should we be eating insects?

Eighty per cent of the people on the planet regularly consume insects from a range of over 2,000 species. They eat sago grubs in Papua New Guinea, grasshoppers in Mexico and dragonflies in Bali. In Western Europe, however, our aversion to ingesting bugs has a long tradition. Even the Romans, whom few of us would regard as fussy eaters, frowned on the eastern practice of cooking locusts.

Generally speaking, insects are high in protein and essential fatty acids and low in cholesterol. Despite our cultural distaste for entomophagy, in recent years the idea that we should eat bugs has been gaining currency. A 2004 UN report promoted insects as an environmentally friendly food source: low impact, consuming very little in the way of feed, easy to harvest, with no special measures required for their husbandry. Last summer when 17-year cicadas appeared in their trillions across the US, magazines and newspapers offered recipes for the soft-shelled hatchlings, but there were also disclaimers that some cicadas might have absorbed insecticides.


We don't really know how. It's one thing to travel to South America and eat some chocolate-covered bees as a way of demonstrating broadmindedness, and quite another to come home and start drizzling chocolate over your own bees. You could go to a place where they eat ants, and develop a taste for them, but what would you do the next time you opened a box of oatmeal and found it crawling with them? Can you microwave it like that or do you sieve out the ants and fry them separately? Who knows?