Eating bugs

I happen to love eating strange and gross things. I've had Saudi roasted goat brain and Ethiopian raw ground beef that have been absolute food revelations. My memory of Moroccan snails, served in a savory broth with a safety pin to fish them out of their shells, is one of my fondest. But perhaps my favorite gross food are insects. I'm by no means a connoisseur, but I have tried a few things: I've had expensive yet disgusting grasshopper taco at Oyamel in DC. And during backpacking trips when the mosquitos were especially thick we often were so fatigued that we would just eat the ones that fell into our evening goulash rather than trying to pick them out.

And it's not only me that digs eating bugs: I once heard that during a particularly severe locust swarm, the Thai government started distributing recipes for locusts. While locusts were not formerly a part of the indigenous Thai diet, these recipes and the abundance of the bugs were just the sort of "big push" that was needed to make locust eating a part of the equilibrium. (I have no verification for this story--anybody know of any sources?). My bro-in-law talks fondly about eating live silkworms in South Korea. Well maybe not that fondly. Maybe he was just trying to gross us out.

So of course it was with great interest that I read the following article, which discusses why eating bugs is so great and why legal restrictions ought to be removed such that these delicious insects can become a bigger part of our diets and lives: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/print/2011/09/bug-nuggets/8599/

But the important question is: Will demand really catch on? Most of the bug products here seem to be highly processed to resemble other foods. But unless one's demand is highly price elastic or if the yuck factor is small, people seem unlikely to substitute from chicken nuggets to bug nuggets.


Another question is will this production become cheap enough that insect food can be competitive? Apparently the bug food industry is not advanced enough such that they can produce bug soup without sometimes admitting off-color flavors. On the other hand, the fact that production relies almost entirely of using food waste (e.g. wheat bran), and that farmers may be willing to pay for such food waster post-bug-production due to increased fertilizer content, means that this might be a fairly low cost industry. In fact, bugs could possibly be even cheaper to produce than plant sources of protein, such as tofu and lentils.

Finally, eating bugs may be good for the environment. If bugs take less resources to grow, and produce less emissions than typical livestock (have you ever smelled a cow fart?), then perhaps bug production should be subsidized to counteract the negative externalities of more traditional animal protein consumption and decrease global warming.

But whether such a subsidy works will depend largely on the demand function. The yuck factor may make such subsidies ineffective. Perhaps only a "big push" or major economic event will make bug eating popular. Like the case of Thailand, perhaps we need a lot of bug cookbooks and a locust swarm, where the relative price of meat to bugs rises precipitously. Or perhaps an advertising campaign featuring Angelina Jolie, her slender fingers sensuously shoving a chocolate-covered locust into her exquisitely lipsticked mouth, would do the trick.


And to end on a provokative note: One place where demand for insects is likely to be high is in poor countries and among poor populations. Lower incomes make them more likely to be willing to buy cheap bug products. Recent research suggests that demand for protein is high, as long as the household can achieve an adequate level of total calories. In contrast, more wealthy agents may need a negative price before being willing to consume such delicacies. Therefore for efficiency it is important to ensure that low-cost bug food is available especially among poor populations. The important thing as far as climate change is concerned is that aggregate demand for environmentally-unfriendly beef shifts to the left, not which populations start eating bugs---and it will be much less costly to implement such a policy if it is the poor who eat the bugs.



Thanks to MR for the heads up on the Atlantic's bug-eating article.