“Tasty and healthy, and there is no cholesterol”. Why do people eat insects and worms
Koreans cook for dinner silkworms, fried caterpillars Africans and Mexicans are making soup out of ant eggs.
MOSCOW, may 26 — RIA Novosti, Alfia Enikeeva. In Western countries, where insects are traditionally disliked, already make bread crickets, protein bars from worms and canned bees. RIA Novosti understood why people eat insects and how it is useful.
Delicious, safe, inexpensive
In Moscow to try fried grasshoppers and silkworm deep-fried can only be in one place — on the market “Gardener”. And if you have a friend Vietnamese. Fans can order insects online Thai or Vietnamese sites, and flour or protein bars from crickets available in the American and European online stores.
In the US and the EU breeding insects on special farms and manufacturing of these food products rapidly gaining popularity. As shown by research scientists at Wageningen University (the Netherlands), greenhouse gas emissions associated with the cultivation of insect larvae, almost ten times less than in beef production (the comparison was conducted on the amount of allocated carbon dioxide per kilogram of protein obtained). The total area of land used for the cultivation of insects, 14 times less than the total territory of livestock farms.
The cultivation of insects is really much safer from an environmental point of view, and the food is incredibly healthy.
“If you take the crickets, in addition to high levels of protein — about seventy percent — they contain a lot of iron, calcium, fatty acids omega-3 and omega-9, is vitamin B12. Where such a set is still found?” — agrees with the findings of researchers Sergey Makarov, the founder of the cricket farm not far from Minsk.
Traditions do not allow
On his farm crickets grown and frozen in vacuum packaging at a temperature of minus thirty degrees. In this form the arthropods fall into a restaurant or enterprise, where they will fry in oil or cook them a meal. Similar farms open in the US and Europe, and in Asian countries a lot of them. In Japan bred a special food of bees, in China, the boiled and fried eat silkworm pupae, left over from the production of silk. In Russia such a large-scale nasekomojadny farms no.
“Our people are just not used to it. This is due not only to cultural attitudes, but also to the types of insects that are found on the territory of Russia. They are all of small size. They are very difficult to eat. In South-East Asia, insects are a major. So there from the very beginning had a sense of eating them,” explains entomologist Sergey Sinev, Deputy Director on scientific work of the Zoological Institute RAS.