2)+Insects

__**Insects as food (Entomophagy)**__

Entomophagy is the practice of eating insects as food. The term is also used to describe human insect-eating that is common in some cultures in parts of the world including Central and South America, Africa, Asia, Australia and New Zealand, but uncommon and even taboo in some societies. Entomophagy can be divided into two categories: insects used as a source of nutrients and insects as condiments. Some insects are eaten as larvae, others as adults. Over 1200 species of insects are used as food by people throughout the world. Commonly eaten insects and arachnids include grasshoppers, crickets, termites, ants, beetle larvae (grubs), moth caterpillars and pupae, spiders, tarantulas, and scorpions. __**How it started**__ Before humans had tools to hunt or practice agriculture, insects must have represented an important part of their diet. Evidence of this has been found by analyzing coprolites from caves in USA and Mexico. Coprolites in caves in the Ozark Mountains were found to contain ants, beetle larvae, lice, ticks, and mites. This is not unexpected, as most apes are, to a greater or lesser extent, insectivorous. Insects have played an important part in the history of human nutrition in Africa, Australia, Asia and the Americas. Hundreds of species have been used as human food. Some of the more important groups include grasshoppers, caterpillars, beetle grubs and (sometimes) adults, winged termites (some of which are very large in the tropics), bee, wasp and ant brood (larvae and pupae) as well as winged ants, cicadas, and a variety of aquatic insects. Ordinarily, insects are not used as emergency food to ward off starvation, but are included as a normal part of the diet throughout the year or when seasonally available. In Europe the use of insects of foods has always been very limited. Although frequently mentioned in ancient Greek and Roman literature, there are only very few reports on the use of insects as food in later centuries. Only in times of starvation, insects were eaten. The main reason for the difference between Europe and the other continents is that insects are not so abundant and generally much smaller as in tropical regions.

__**Advantages**__

Insects generally have a higher food conversion efficiency than more traditional meats. Only 10% of ingested food is converted to body substance by beef cattle, versus 19-31% by silkworms and 44% by German cockroaches. When reared at 30°C or more and fed a diet of equal quality to the diet used to rear conventional livestock, crickets showed a food conversion twice as efficient as pigs and broiler chicks, four times that of sheep. Insects reproduce at a faster rate than beef animals. A female cricket can lay from 1,200 to 1,500 eggs in 3 to 4 weeks.This gives house crickets a true food conversion efficiency almost 20 times higher than beef. For this reason and because of the essential amino acids content of insects, some people propose the development of entomophagy to provide a major source of protein in human nutrition. Less resources are used and more yield is produced. This makes insect meat more ecological than vertebrate meat.

__**Disadvantages**__ Within Western culture, entomophagy (barring honey and some food dyes) is seen as taboo. Pesticide use can make insects unsuitable for human consumption. Herbicides can accumulate in insects through bioaccumulation. For example when locust outbreaks are treated by spraying, people can no longer eat them.