Flour made with insects wins $1M Prize
There’s been a concerted effort lately by world leaders to supplement or replace diets with insects.We reported on the issue here:
The UN has come out with a report that suggests increasing insects in our diets will not only benefit our health, but ’benefit the environment’, and stave off ’food shortages due to increasing global population’.
While it’s largely a matter of choice and tastes, as bugs are a protein and already consumed largely around the world, the west doesn’t consume insects in any notable quantity (knowingly) and is being encouraged towards a change of protein source from animals or plants, to insects.
Digital Journal reports on a recent prized awared to a research team for developing bug-flour...
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McGill University students win $1m prize to develop insect flour
By Dawn Denmar | DigitalJournal
Aspire Food Group, a team of five MBA students from McGill, won the Hult Prize student competition for social good on Sept. 23. The social entrepreneurship award will aid developing the business, aiming to provide nutritious food to slum dwellers.
The award was presented to the students by former US President Bill Clinton following a successful presentation to the Clinton Global Initiative Annual Meeting in New York City last Monday evening. The competition challenge this year was to tackle global hunger and panel members included Clinton, Erathrin Cousin, CEO of the World Food Program and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Muhammad Yunus.
The five students from the Desautels Faculty of Management are Mohammed Ashour, Shobhita Soor, Jesse Pearlstein, Zev Thompson and Gabe Mott. Their team was one of over 10,000 worldwide teams that entered the competition. This year’s challenge was to create a social enterprise to provide food to undernourished communities, particularly for the 200 million people living in urban slums.The winning project involves the production, process and promotion of insects for human consumption. The insects are farmed and ground into a fine powder then incorporated into locally-available flour, creating what the students term "power flour".
Mohammed Ashour explained to CBC News that this was “essentially flour that is fortified with protein and iron obtained from locally appropriate insects.”
The students had noted that protein and iron were in short supply in diets of many people from developing nations and available at high levels in insects. They explained that crickets have a higher protein content by weight than beef.
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Read the full article at: digitaljournal.com
