UN "Food Shortage" Solution? Eat Bugs
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’.
Associated Press writes:
The latest weapon in the U.N.’s fight against hunger, global warming and pollution might be flying by you right now.
Edible insects are being promoted as a low-fat, high-protein food for people, pets and livestock. According to the U.N., they come with appetizing side benefits: Reducing greenhouse gas emissions and livestock pollution, creating jobs in developing countries and feeding the millions of hungry people in the world.
Some edible insect information in bite-sized form:
WHO EATS INSECTS NOW?
Two billion people do, largely in Asia, Africa and Latin America, the Rome-based U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization said Monday as it issued a report exploring edible insect potential.
Some insects may already be in your food (and this is no fly-in-my-soup joke). Demand for natural food coloring as opposed to artificial dyes is increasing, the agency’s experts say. A red coloring produced from the cochineal, a scaled insect often exported from Peru, already puts the hue in a trendy Italian aperitif and an internationally popular brand of strawberry yogurt. Many pharmaceutical companies also use colorings from insects in their pills.
PACKED WITH PROTEIN, FULL OF FIBER
Scientists who have studied the nutritional value of edible insects have found that red ants, small grasshoppers and some water beetles pack (gram-per-gram or ounce-per-ounce) enough protein to rank with lean ground beef while having less fat per gram.
Bored with bran as a source of fiber in your diet? Edible insects can oblige, and they also contain useful minerals such as iron, magnesium, phosphorous, selenium and zinc.
[...]
ECO-FRIENDLY
Insects on average can convert 2 kilograms (4.4 pounds) of feed into 1 kilogram (2.2 pounds) of edible meat. In comparison, cattle require 8 kilograms (17.6 pounds) of feed to produce a kilogram of meat. Most insects raised for food are likely to produce fewer environmentally harmful greenhouse gases than livestock, the U.N. agency says.
Power to the people who eat and enjoy insects, but the idea that the UN is pushing BUGS as the solution to world hunger is ludicrous. Know what else is low-fat, high protein food for people? Chickens. Yet many people are restricted by local governments from slaughtering or even owning chickens. Mice, too, are a small and crunchy source of protein, yet we spend time, labour, and money on ridding rodents from our homes and lives. But the UN insists we should all start keeping writhing swarms of insects on our properties?
The UN is offering solutions to a manufactured problem that they are helping to create with their food programs; bags of rice, beans, (GMO) wheat and (rBGH) milk powder rations that they have continuously dumped on people who really should be able to grow their own food, instead of being undermined by corrupt governing bodies, and dependent on UN imports as a source of food.
Add to this the reports of abundant crops rotting in the fields, and the astonishing degree of food waste, and we should reconsider claims of ’food shortages’.
From Reuters:
Every day some 3,000 Indian children die from illnesses related to malnutrition, and yet countless heaps of rodent-infested wheat and rice are rotting in fields across the north of their own country.
It is an extraordinary paradox created by a rigid regime of subsidies for grain farmers, a woeful lack of storage facilities and an inefficient, corruption-plagued public distribution system that fails millions of impoverished people.
"This is a case of criminal neglect by the government," said D. Raja, national secretary of the Communist Party of India, an opposition group. "The ruling party has been the worst manager of the demand-supply of food grains."
If distribution, storage, and corruption is the problem, will replacing one food source with another REALLY make a difference?
This Problem-Reaction-Solution should ’bug’ many people!
By Red Ice Creations