Flying Lobsters

Somewhere in Austin, Texas is a company, Aspire Food Group, founded by three MBA graduates from McGill University who parlayed their $1 million Hult Prize for social good to a food production business. Robots and modern methods are used to raise by the millions what is described as a six-legged livestock that could very well be crucial to solving the future world food crisis.

"Food is the burning question in animal society, and the whole structure and activities of the community are dependent upon questions of food-supply".       ------ Charles Elton

In less than a century from today, our concerns for world peace, climate change, and every disaster we can think of will all pale by comparison to global food shortage and the ensuing famine that will follow. We can worry about energy supply and debate clean alternatives to fossil and nuclear plants but hardly do we hear much about food production. Food is the ultimate energy source because what good is anything if our survival is threatened by the shortage of it.

That company in Austin is raising crickets as a source of food - for human consumption. Please suppress your squeamishness temporarily and read on. Our future depends on it. But first, some terminology housekeeping.

Crickets and grasshoppers are related. They both belong to the insect order "Orthoptera", which means "straight wings". They both produce sounds, called stridulation, by rubbing their body parts. We're familiar with sounds made by crickets. They rub their wings together. Grasshoppers rub their long hind legs, albeit not quite as acoustically impressive as those produced by crickets. Grasshoppers, when they multiply rapidly and swarm to ravage agriculture, are called locusts. The word locust is actually Latin for crustacean and more specifically - lobster. These species of insects are therefore flying lobsters. My description. You will not find them being described as such anywhere else. It is also a way to catch the reader's attention.

Almost a third of the world's population, about two billion people, eat insects regularly. Insects by weight, not just by sheer numbers mind you, outweigh the entire human population several times over. Termites alone weigh more than the entire human population of 7 billion people. A huge part of survival training for military pilots is knowing how to find and eat bugs. Chimpanzees that are typically vegetarian supplement their diet with protein by eating termites or ants. Bears have similar inclination except that they're more omnivorous. And so are we. 

Many years ago, the island I grew up in suffered intermittent locust infestation of its rice fields and grasslands. Millions of the insects would be netted and collected, fried, roasted and smoked and end up in market stalls all over the area. On several occasions I tasted the delicacy in fried and smoked versions. They were actually very tasty. It is still a delicacy in many parts of the world today although it is not always readily available in huge quantity because locust swarms are after all rare these days, hence a delicacy in many parts of the world, but probably a staple in some areas of Africa and Asia. I will have you know also that there are four varieties of locusts that are considered kosher under the Jewish laws of kashrut. John the Baptist, from The New Testament account, ate locusts while in the wilderness.

Here is a quote from the July/August issue of Discover Magazine:

"Pound for pound, crickets and other edible insects offer the most bang for the planet's resources. Crickets pack more protein than beef, more calcium than milk, more iron than spinach and as many fatty acids from salmon".

Crickets and locusts are fast growers so it would only take 2 pounds of feed to produce one pound of edible food while it would take 25 pounds of feed to produce a pound of beef.

World population will increase by the billions in a matter of 7-10 decades so food production may not only be crucial, it will be direly critical for survival.

Those who remember the 1973 movie, "Soylent Green", saw a fictional preview of the world to come. A lot of science fiction stories when they were written depicted periods we have already lived and the predictions never came about.  Take the novel-turned-into-a-movie, "1984". We've all gone past that year a long time ago and it never happened. But think about it now. A few things in that movie seem to be here today.  Big Brother is very much in play these days. Not quite the 1984 Big Brother but do you ever wonder why after just barely leaving Home Depot or some restaurant you get pinged by Google asking you to rate the establishment?  Or, have you Googled your street address lately and find out your neighbor four houses down has a new swimming pool? Back to "Soylent Green". Without spoiling the ending for those who haven't watch the movie, the fictional year was 2022 - just four years away! It won't be so. But many decades from today or maybe at the turn of this century, "Soylent Green" could be it.

Food. That is the final frontier. Just to be overly dramatic. Or, is it? That final frontier for food would look bland, tube-encased, dehydrated-add-water-varieties from Styrofoam boxes.  Talk to astronauts and all future spacefarers. The food they eat at the space station today are clearly not the kind we have at our earthbound dining tables, as far as texture, presentation and perhaps even taste are concerned. But food is food, isn't it? We need food for energy, growth and maintenance of our body parts. Carbohydrates and anything that can be converted into sugar (our main fuel) and protein for growth are the two basic food classifications.  Insects, as it turned out, when broken down into their nutritional values are just as nutritious, if not more so than fish, fowl or meat. They may not be as appetizing to us because we've been raised to like certain foods of a particular texture and taste  but tell that to the mockingbird, the flycatcher, the gecko and other insect-devouring creatures. They've been around a long time and they had been taking advantage of a food resource that had existed since the time of the dinosaurs. Insects are the least likely to become extinct and scientists think insects are the guaranteed inheritors of the planet if and when catastrophic events wipe out much of all living things.  Everyday we hear, read about mosquitoes, flies and harmful beetles, we are reminded of how difficult it is to eradicate even just a fraction of the insect population. I will try to make a point here.

Well, the Austin company could be on to something. The problem of course is cultural adjustments in the West. The company is not into serving the insects as is but as ground up ingredients into flour and perhaps into milkshakes. I can see it now - the alliterative phrase, "insect shakes". 

Let's look at the proverbial links of the food chain, shall we. 

Plants - from succulents to tubers to vegetables to fruit trees and kelp from the oceans - are the ultimate synthesizers of the energy from the sun, hence photosynthesis. By harnessing the energy of sunlight and extracting nutrients from the soil, plants are in effect food factories that no machines can ever replicate. Not even close. But it makes them the bottom of the food chain, where algae is the prime green carpet. Just barely above in the food chain are worms, aphids, crawlers and then flying or hopping insects. Fish that eat algae get eaten by bigger fishes. Insects get eaten by other insects or by birds and lizards, etc. But bigger mammals, prey and farm animals also dine on grasses, hay, leaves and fruit. Lest we forget all of these and then some are all food factories themselves. It is one of nature's marvels that a cow that eats nothing but grass can produce milk and rib eye steaks. Think about how vitamin D from the sun and calcium and iron and other minerals from the soil were all synthesized in just three to four steps to reach the top of the food chain. Us. By classification we can be lumped, together with the big cats and wolves, into the genera of predators. We, together with all the predators, have successfully short-circuited the processes from harnessing the sun's energy to synthesizing nutrients from the soil and water by simply dining on prey.

Dining on insects, next to eating veggies and fruit, is probably the shortest route we can think of to harness what is from the earth and the sun.

Now, aside from convincing your grand children that hamburger meat and hot dogs at one time belonged to living animals, let them be aware that being at the top of the food chain also means that anything below is fair game. That is putting it bluntly, of course.

First notice this one truism in nature. The ratio of predators to prey is such that for the ecology to work, prey should outnumber predators. World population growth is about to disturb that ratio. Earlier concern was the clearing of lands for agriculture. Today, we are also clearing them so we can build homes for the burgeoning population. The prospect is getting dire at every acre or hectare conversion around the world.

Is that innovative company in Austin, TX going to be one of the solutions? Is it the one to ensure Soylent Green doesn't happen?