Friday, December 21, 2012

Will eating Worms instead of Meat save the Planet?

Live Science   The wriggly beetle larvae known as mealworms could one day dominate supermarket shelves as a more sustainable alternative to chicken, beef, pork and milk, researchers in the Netherlands say.

Currently, livestock use about 70 percent of all farmland. In addition, the demand for animal protein continues to rise globally, and is expected to grow by up to 80 percent between 2012 and 2050.
The act of clearing land for livestock is one that damages the environments on which people and other life depend. For instance, it helps release global warming gases.[...]

The researchers found that growing mealworms released less greenhouse gases than producing cow milk, chicken, pork and beef. They also discovered that growing mealworms takes up only about 10 percent of the land used for production of beef, 30 percent of the land used for pork and 40 percent of the land needed for chickens to generate similar amounts of protein. The researchers note that optimizing mealworm growth might lead to even more land savings. [Save the Planet? 10 Bizarre Solutions]

"Since the population of our planet keeps growing, and the amount of land on this Earth is limited, a more efficient, and more sustainable system of food production is needed," Oonincx said in a statement. "Now, for the first time it has been shown that mealworms, and possibly other edible insects, can aid in achieving such a system."


4 comments:

  1. I would think it makes more sense to reduce population growth. Every other plan only delays catastrophe. The good news is that population is already on a downward trend. Whether this will be in time to save the ecosystem remains to be seen. So perhaps mealworms isn't such a bad idea.

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  2. how do worms do as meat substitute in chulent?

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  3. Population growth has already slowed to an average fertility rate of 2.4. children per woman worldwide, and world population will probably peek at about 10 billion in about 20 years....

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  4. Avraham, Remark,

    Your comments run counter to the ratzon Hashem of milu es haaretz urivu ba. Hashem has always provided the means of food production such as major agricultural advances. Population decline is an anti Torah anti human idea.

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