Industrial meat production and fish harvests have dropped the economic cost of animal proteins in recent decades. But much of that fiscal savings has come at the expense of the environment. Wastes are not captured and destroyed or recycled. They’re allowed to run into the ground or waterways, degrading ecosystems all along the way. These are costs that are not captured in traditional accounting.
Anyone who has tried fishing in the Gulf of Mexico’s annual dead zone has experienced one cost of allowing livestock wastes from the upper Midwest to flow through the ground and into waters that feed the mighty Mississippi—and Gulf of Mexico (SN: 6/12/04, p. 378). Anyone who lives with the pervasive stench downwind of animal feedlots knows there’s a cost that they’re being asked to subsidize with their discomfort—and perhaps health.
Fishers, in recent years, have been mining the ocean’s top and middle predators, substantially distorting the balance of ecosystems (SN: 6/4/05, p. 360). The net primary productivity of the oceans probably hasn’t changed much: that is to say, about the same mass of living cells probably inhabits it. However, instead of tuna, cod, sharks, and trout, the bulk of the mass may be shifting to alewives, smelt, jellyfish, and algae (SN: 2/7/98, p. 86). One solution, fish farming, has proven moderately successful—but can also prove harmful to nonfarmed species and the environment generally.
"Part of the reason that livestock and fish farms have become ecological disasters is that they have moved away from mimicking the environment in which animals exist naturally," the Worldwatch report maintains.
There’s another problem as well. People the world over want to eat the same few species—cows, pigs, and lambs, salmon, tuna, and trout—even if their own environment cannot support the production of these animals. Moreover, as relatively large and high-in-the-food-chain animals, these species grow at the expense of hosts of plants, animals, and other energy inputs. The land and energy needed to produce 1,000 calories of grain, legumes (like soy), or algae is a fraction of what it takes to produce 1,000 calories of beef or catfish.
Many people don’t want to eat just greens, grains, and pulses (like beans). In truth, I don’t.
However, there is another source of animal protein that may prove dramatically more sustainable than fish and hoofed livestock: Insects.
All right, it may take a bit of work to wrap your head around this idea—especially if you grew up in the U.S.A. We’re talking ants, grasshoppers, and beetles.
There was a time and place where the arrival of hordes of locusts blackening the skies was a period for rejoicing. Hungry farmers would see this as a smorgasbord of animal protein that could be gathered by the bucketsful. Eaten raw, fried with onion and chilies, or roasted for consumption throughout the months ahead, this was nutritionally high-quality animal protein. And you didn’t have to chase it. It came to you.
Those old enough to remember shipments of food aid to starving masses in Ethiopia and Somalia during the ’70s and ’80s may also remember scandals describing hundreds if not thousands of tons of wheat flour that arrived at its destinations spoiled by infestations of beetles, notes Victor B. Meyer-Rochow of Jacobs University in Bremen, Germany. "But that’s really nonsense," he argues, "because those beetles were nutritionally more valuable than [the grain] that people were trying to protect."
Bottom line, diets throughout the globe have been changing. And if we all want reliable access to animal protein, we may have to embrace mini-livestock—the six-legged kinds.