If We Ever Get Real Hungry …

 There have been warnings about getting enough food if the climate gets too hot or (a smaller chance) too cold.  How could there be enough beef for our McDonald’s big mac? 

Easy, the larvae of black soldier ants make a great high-protein supplement for cattle feed.  The larvae can eat almost anything organic, and they grow phenomenally fast.  How much do they grow?  About 10,000-fold in 14 days.  That’s about like an 8-pound baby growing into a 40-ton whale.

The ancient Greeks and Romans thought locusts (big grasshoppers) were a delicacy.  John the Baptist in The Bible lived on honey and locusts.  There are some Arab tribes that to this day eat … yes, locusts. 

Robotics and fine mesh screens mean that various insects can be penned in, fed, and harvested like very small Herford cattle.  Many of them, such as grasshoppers, are herbivores; think of very small feed lots. 

You might not like the idea of eating bugs.  To tell the truth, I’m not thrilled about it either.  However, there are other approaches

Some of that insect food production could be high-protein livestock feed for pigs, chickens, and cattle.  For aquaponics, they can also replace high-protein fish powder for farmed predator fish such as salmon.  The fish powder usually comes from increasingly scarce wild catch.

If things were to get even hungrier, people could eat some of those soldier-ant larvae or full-grown grasshoppers.  I wonder if they taste like … chicken?

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