FOOD PROBLEM AND INSECT EATING

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First of all we’d like to explain how efficient it is to eat worms and insects.

Actually, compared with cows, worms and insects require only 1/5500 of water to produce the same amount of protein.
The amount of CO2 that insects discharge is 1/1800, and the amount of feed that insects require is 17%^※1

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The above is the table about the efficiency in producing protein of crickets and main livestock.
Crickets exceed livestock in the feed conversion efficiency ( how much feed they need to increase their weight by 1 kilogram ) and the rate of edible parts.
And the edible part of crickets contain as much protein as that of other livestock.
This proves that crickets are a good source of protein. You will also find that compared with chickens, cows and pigs are much less efficient as a food source.

People say that worms and insects are our future food, which will be helpful to solve our future food problem.
Worms and Insects for food are, however, already available now. And we already face food problems now.
So we have to solve the current food problems in order to avoid the future food crisis.

Let’s talk about the reality we face. The amount of food which people produce is enough to feed the whole population of the world.
While people in developed countries enjoy consuming a lot of “inefficient” beef or pork and dump 1.3 billion tons of food a year, an estimated 820 million people in the world are suffering from hunger^※2※3.
The current food problem is created by this imbalanced structure of society, in which rich people waste the food which the poor are desperately in need of.

If we eat chicken instead of pork or beef, it could make things easier for poor countries or people, and when we get bored of eating chicken, we can make use of worms or insects for food.
Because they are poikilotherms, they have as high feed conversion efficiency as broilers do.
Also different insects have different tastes like nuts, fish or pear. Furthermore, we can raise insects with feed made from abandoned food.
Pigs are raised in the same way now, but insects’ feed conversion efficiency is higher than pigs’.
So farming worms and insects could reduce the amount of dumped food.
Insects for food is not something we will have in the far future but what we already have and can use.

Of course, we do not have to stop eating beef or pork completely. Few experts think people in the future should eat only insect food.
The most appropriate way to solve this problem is to slowly shift from beef and pork to chicken, insects and some other substitute meat.
To make this work, we need to make insect food more popular.
It means we need to have people eat them and let people realize that they are delicious.
Many people somehow do not want to eat worms and insects.They may have a biased idea against eating them.
(please see the page “barriers to insects eating”)

We asked dozens of people to try insect food before we started to make this website, and most of them said that insects were more delicious than they thought.
We want you all to have the courage to try insect food. It will be the first step to make insect food popular and to realize the world without starvation.