If insects were such a valuable and risk free source of nutrition wouldn't we see a lot more human cultures eating them?
They've been around forever, but somehow we share a mostly common disgust for eating bugs. Is it farfetched to assume that perhaps that disgust allowed us to survive.
They're not a practical food source. They're hard to farm, they taste bad, they're subject to predators, etc. There are lots of cultures that eat a few insects but I've never seen a single one that gets >33% of their daily protein from insects. The human gut produces chitinase but I don't know how it would react to tens of grams of chitin per day.
There Is a more interesting way to utilize insects as food… By cultivating them and turning them into chicken eggs.
We are experimenting With various forms of maggot farms and meal worm farms which are then fed to our flock of chickens, which turn those food and energy inputs into eggs.
That's simply not true. The UN FAO estimates that 2B people worldwide consume terrestrial insects regularly in their diets. Add in aquatic insects like shrimp or lobster and that number increases drastically.
2B people intentionally consume terrestrial insects.
99+% of humans incidentally consume terrestrial insects. Food processing is imperfect and insect contaminants are common.
"But the FDA allows up to 225 insect fragments per 225 grams of macaroni (yes, that's one piece of bug per gram) and 4.5 rodent hairs per 225 grams. Per 100 grams, the FDA allows either 10 fly eggs, five fly eggs and one maggot, or two maggots in most tomato products."
A lot of animals do eat insects however, so it is not that they are dangerous a priori. Our evolutionary ancestors, small mammals/primates, most likely did eat insects. We somehow evolved them out of our diet. Strange actually, since they are quite abundant.
They've been around forever, but somehow we share a mostly common disgust for eating bugs. Is it farfetched to assume that perhaps that disgust allowed us to survive.