Outside the United States, though, in Botswana and Zimbabwe, insect gathering is becoming commercialized. And rural villagers in southern Africa harvest caterpillars from the local mopane trees. Traditionally, mopane caterpillars have been an important source of protein for the villagers, but more recently they have also been packaged and sold as a regional delicacy.
In fact, at least 1,400 species of insects are eaten around the world, and the practice dates back thousands of years. However, even commercially distributed species such as the mopane caterpillar are harvested from wild insect populations, meaning that they are subject to year-to-year fluctuations and problems of overharvesting. What is needed to stabilize the insect food supply is the development of farms. “I’ve been working for a long time on trying to convince people that farming insects for the production of animal protein and other materials might be a good idea,” says Robert Kok, chairman of the department of bioresource engineering at McGill University, near Montreal. “Even if they didn’t want to eat them ‘whole hog,’ so to say, it would be possible to extract the protein and oil from them and then manufacture food products from those components,” Kok adds.
William White of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Agricultural Research Service in Houma, Louisiana, is skeptical that this will ever come to pass in the United States, where food tends to be overabundant rather than scarce, at least among those above the poverty line. “I don’t believe that we’ve reached the level of scarcity in our food supply, at least in Western societies, where people would be willing to incorporate insects at any level in their diet,” White says. “Certainly in the United States, the [response to] insects almost borders on a phobia.” As Marion Nestle, professor of nutrition at New York University and the author of What to Eat, puts it, “I think people would have to be desperate for food to make insects a principal part of their diet.” There are other obstacles too: Some insects, such as sea shrimp, cause food allergies; others sequester toxins from plants or may harbor pesticide residues.
Even if we don’t all switch to Bug Burgers, Gracer and his insects are helping to change our habit of making knee-jerk decisions about what we should and shouldn’t be eating. According to the latest figures from the United Nations, 854 million people around the world went hungry in 2003. Really thinking about our food choices could be the first step toward feeding our planet’s ever-growing population in a sustainable manner.
Gracer continues to spend much of his spare time speaking at museums and schools about the benefits and joys of bug eating. In the long term, though, he has grander plans: He would like to import edible insects such as the popular mopane caterpillars or set up a commercial operation selling insects already available here, such as spicy Mexican grasshoppers, or chapulines. He knows his mission is not an easy one; for one thing, there is the small matter of funding. “If I did this for a living, my family and I would be eating bugs all the time,” he says.
