Photo: Suzanne and John’s Mom.
Cattle at Codman Farms, Lincoln, Mass. “Cows are often described as climate change criminals,” says Grist, “because of how much planet-warming methane they burp.” But, Grist adds, raising ruminants can also lead to deforestation, making alternatives to meat doubly important.
The other day at dinner, my husband regaled Sally and me with the latest on Europe’s use of mealworms as alternative proteins. The idea of eating mealworms — straight, no chaser — was not appealing to me even though I know they often sneak into the packaged nut and grain products we buy at the store. Which is why I freeze those products for 24 hours. I suppose I eat frozen mealworms that way, but it’s inevitable.
Grist magazine reported recently on the damage that livestock agribusinesses do to the planet when they cut down trees to graze more animals.
Max Graham says, “To feed the world’s growing appetite for meat, corporations and ranchers are chopping down more forests and trampling more carbon-sequestering grasslands to make room for pastures and fields of hay. … The greenhouse gases unleashed by this deforestation and land degradation mean food systems account for one-third of the world’s human-generated climate pollution.”
At Nature magazine I learned that alternative proteins are gaining traction in France, of all unlikely places. The focus is not on eating insects straight.
Rachael Pells writes at Nature about “the world’s largest vertical insect farm — home to at least 3 trillion mealworm beetles (Tenebrio molitor). The company’s chief executive and co-founder, Antoine Hubert, says that the beetles have a good life, as far as being an insect goes. Each of their stacked plastic trays is kept at an optimal 60% humidity and a balmy 25–27 °C. Nutrition, growth and moisture levels are all recorded for analysis, and human visitors are allowed to inspect the trays only from a distance — to prevent contamination of this prized ecosystem.
“The beetles are raised in this way from larvae to adult, at which point they meet a quick death in steam before being harvested into oil, protein and fertilizer.
“Insects have come under the spotlight over the past few years, as scientists seek alternative sources of protein to feed the rapidly expanding global population. A direct nutritional comparison shows that edible insect species have greater protein potential than do conventional meat products — 100 grams of mealworm larvae produces 25 g of protein, whereas 100 g of beef contains 20 g of protein. Insects also have a high food-conversion ratio when compared with livestock.
“To produce the same amount of protein, for example, crickets require around six times less feed than do cattle, four times less than sheep, and half that of pigs and chickens. But various attempts by companies to market insects as a mainstream food source in Europe and North America have fallen flat and largely been dismissed as a fad. And some researchers have concerns about the effects on the environment, ranging from whether escaped insects might disrupt local ecosystems to the impact of insect ‘factories.’ So why farm insects at all?
” ‘The world is facing a huge food sustainability crisis,’ explains Huber, an environmental engineer. ‘Insect protein is one very realistic and obvious solution to mitigating some of those challenges,’ he says.
“With the global population expected to reach almost 10 billion by 2050, United Nations forecasters have warned that food production will also need to increase by as much as 70%.
“However, because mealworm burgers are, at the moment, unlikely to sell out in your local supermarket, Ÿnsect grows insects for animal feed. This is given to fish, pigs and poultry, taking the pressure off conventional agricultural land use.
“The use of vertical farming has grown rapidly over the past few years, spurred on, in part, by advances in LED lighting, the cost of which fell by 94% between 2008 and 2015. Several start-ups (including Infarm in Berlin and Aerofarms in Newark, New Jersey) use the system to produce vegetables such as lettuce for human consumption. And the global market of the vertical-farming industry is expected to grow from US$3.7 billion in 2021 to $10.5 billion in 2026.
“Meanwhile, sales of plant-based alternatives to meat that are designed to reduce the demand for cattle farming — an industry responsible for 65% of all livestock emissions — seem to be stalling. When meat-substitute company Beyond Meat in El Segundo, California, went public on the stock market in 2019, its share price rose by 163%. But after the initial excitement, sales slowed, and they have remained about the same since 2020.”
As with most innovations, there are caveats. Get the details at Nature, here. And for a report on livestock and deforestation, check out Grist, here. No paywalls for either one.
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