cbcnews | A team of McGill University MBA students has won the $1 million Hult
Prize for a project that aims to improve the availability of nutritious
food to slum dwellers around the world by providing them with
insect-infused flour.
Mohammed Ashour, Shobhita Soor, Jesse Pearlstein, Zev Thompson and
Gabe Mott were presented with the social entrepreneurship award and $1
million in seed capital by former U.S. president Bill Clinton in New
York City Monday evening at the Clinton Global Initiative’s annual
meeting.
The money will help them grow Aspire Food Group, an organization that
will produce nutritious insect-based food products that will be
accessible year-round to some of the world’s poorest city dwellers.
“We are farming insects and we’re grinding them into a fine powder
and then we’re mixing it with locally appropriate flour to create what
we call power flour,” Ashour explained to CBC News.
“It is essentially flour that is fortified with protein and iron obtained from locally appropriate insects.” Fist tap Dale.
9 comments:
Slowly but surely it is being crafted into the sexy thing to do..., I'm not mad at'em, I'm just more fascinated by the process under which our cultural revulsion to insects is being subjected to mass modification in a somewhat compressed timeframe.
With enough strong kush in my system, a roaring case of the munchies, Ali Landry glistening with the minimum recommended amount of clothing http://thechive.com/2008/12/09/remember-doritos-girl-ali-landry-i-do-50-photos/ - I'd even think about putting some roach-doritos in my mouth.
I'm really saying, let's eat the bugs -- if it's practical and not just another pipe dream --but let's see the Queen or Bill Gates baking in the kitchen with bug flour. Treat it like a wartime necessity. Having scientists tell poor people, try this or that change in farming and nutrition, we'll check back in 20 and see if you're extinct ... that's an old story.
I get a baking jones when I can't sleep, and I'm tempted to try it ... made my own bagels for the first time a couple nights ago ... but thing is there are a lot of bugs and I don't know how each kind tastes.
A slightly different take on this topic: They don't expect you to eat insects. (Sure, Asians and Africans do it, but Americans are finicky.) The idea is, farmed insects will become food for fish or pigs.
A vendor sells edible insects at Talad Thai market on the outskirts of Bangkok. The most popular method of preparation is to deep-fry crickets in oil and then sprinkle them with lemongrass slivers and chilis.
It all starts in a small greenhouse. "This is where we propagate our species," says Glen Courtright, EnviroFlight's founder. "Sometimes we call this the Love Shack."
Gordon recommends dusting the deep-fried tarantula spider with smoked paprika.
I see rows of tall, cylinder-shaped cages. Flying around inside them, or sitting on the mesh walls, are some black insects that look a little like wasps.
Actually, they're flies: .
These flies live all over the American South, but they rarely bother people, and they don't spread disease. The adults are shy creatures. They can't bite. They can't eat (they live off the stored energy that they built up as larvae). All they really do is mate and lay eggs. That's what they're doing in these cages.
The eggs turn into hatchlings that are so tiny they look like dust. But in EnviroFlight's nursery, they grow a mass of wriggling larvae. Kimberly Wildman keeps them in stacks of plastic trays or buckets.
"If I were to feed them, it would feel like the bucket was practically melting," she says. "They give off that much heat."
The larvae are insatiable eaters. They can consume twice their weight each day, turning it into protein and fat.
It all starts in a small greenhouse. "This is where we propagate
our species," says Glen Courtright, EnviroFlight's founder. "Sometimes
we call this the Love Shack."
I see rows of tall, cylinder-shaped cages. Flying around inside
them, or sitting on the mesh walls, are some black insects that look a
little like wasps.
Actually, they're flies: .
These
flies live all over the American South, but they rarely bother people,
and they don't spread disease. The adults are shy creatures. They can't
bite. They can't eat (they live off the stored energy that they built up
as larvae). All they really do is mate and lay eggs. That's what
they're doing in these cages.
The eggs turn into hatchlings
that are so tiny they look like dust. But in EnviroFlight's nursery,
they grow a mass of wriggling larvae. Kimberly Wildman keeps them in
stacks of plastic trays or buckets.
"If I were to feed them, it would feel like the bucket was practically melting," she says. "They give off that much heat."
The larvae are insatiable eaters. They can consume twice their weight each day, turning it into protein and fat.
I'm with CNu... fascinated with the compressed timeframe to make eating bugs culturally acceptable.
Don't get me wrong magne. I'm all about becoming voracious bottom feeders, but if I gotta eat bugs, I insist on equal opportunity supplies of weed and fungus to even it all out....,
Eating bugs has to be disgusting! Now let me go back to eating my shrimp and lobster....
It'll be a hard sell, but it's possible. People still eat chitterlings. What's a few roaches compared to that?
lol, to your point, I'll never forget when my daughter was a little girl, we took her on our annual pilgrimage to New Orleans and she was introduced to crawdads as "mudbugs". Understand she's been a lifelong picky eater with some slightly obsessive compulsive tendencies when it comes to what you see, how it's organized, and order of consumption. All that notwithstanding, the girl went hog wild for mudbugs, every aspect of picking apart these large arthropods and getting at the little morsels of reward fascinated her. She would eat the mudbugs until she burst.
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