A supermarket in the UK is planning to sell edible bugs recipe kits as the cost of living crisis hits families amid soaring inflation.
Budget supermarket Aldi is now planning on selling products by Yum Bug, which makes insect recipe kits.
Yum Bug founders Aaron Thomas and Leo Taylor are competing against other start-ups to get their product on supermarket shelves and now seems like the perfect opportunity, the Daily Mail reported.
Thomas said: “We’re on a mission to change perceptions of insects as food; they’re one of the most sustainable protein sources in the world.”
“Crickets are up to 70 percent protein, which is three times the amount of protein found in beef. They’ve also got more iron than spinach, more calcium than milk, and the list keeps going. They are an incredible superfood,” he added.
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“We want to take bug consumption mainstream. If we’re able to get in front of Aldi’s audience, that would be an amazing opportunity, he continued.
Taylor said: “Aaron and I have been cooking with insects for years – it started in 2017 with weekends experimenting out of my parent’s garage, cooking up all sorts of recipes and posting content online.”
“We then sold our first insect recipe boxes out of our bedrooms in lockdown, and that’s really where everything snowballed.”
Last month, The Daily Fetched reported that Aid agencies in the UK are trialing ‘insect diets’ on people suffering from starvation in third-world countries:
The new push to normalize eating bugs is now targeting the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and Zimbabwe as a sort of ‘testing ground,’ according to the Guardian.
According to the outlet, £50,000 (U.S.$57,000) UK aid project in the DRC is adding migratory locusts, black soldier, and African caterpillars to the menu.
In August, South Korean scientists claimed that eating worms could help humanity “save the planet:”
The cooked mealworms, or beetle larvae, with added sugar, creates a “meat” alternative, which researchers claim tastes authentic as an acceptable alternative nutrition source.
“Recently, eating insects has become of interest because of the increasing cost of animal protein, as well as the associated environmental issues,” In Hee Cho, Ph.D., the project’s principal investigator, said in announcing the findings.
The World Economic Forum also championed eating bugs on their website:
The world’s population will reach 9.7 billion people by 2050. This means that despite only 4% of arable land on the surface of our planet, an additional 2 billion more humans will have to be fed.
To address this impending crisis, world experts and leaders will meet this autumn at the UN Food Summit and then the COP26. Often overlooked in these discussions is the potential role insects can play in helping meet this challenge.
Insects are a credible and efficient alternative protein source requiring fewer resources than conventional breeding. Studies suggest that for the same amount of protein produced, insects, mealworms in particular, require much less land than other sources of animal proteins. A study on crickets suggests they are twice as efficient in converting feed to meat as chicken, at least four times more efficient than pigs and 12 times more efficient than cattle.
Today, 12% of the world’s wild whole-fish catch is used for farmed fish in the form of fishmeal. An alternative to fishmeal can be the products resulting from the processing of insects such as the Tenebrio Molitor. It has been shown that with mealworm, mortality in farmed fish is reduced by 40%.
Insect protein has high-quality properties and can be used as an alternative source of protein throughout the food chain, from feed for aquaculture to ingredients for nutritional supplements for humans and pets. All animal species, regardless of their diet, eat insects in their natural diet.
