Can insects save us?
The founding class of UNLEASH Innovation Lab will be held in Denmark in less than a week and I am so excited to be among the 1000 talents that were selected from all over the world. Soon, we will be discussing topics such as gender equality, health, sustainable production and consumption, education, water, clean energy and so on. My specific area of interest is food related (even though it can also be categorized under sustainable production and consumption).
I recently graduated with a PhD in Food Science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and am now back to my home country, Turkey. My research interests during my graduate studies have been related to functional foods and sustainable ingredients. Instead of using animal-based stabilizers in oil and water emulsions, I have done research to compare plant-based emulsifiers such as pea, lentil and bean proteins. To be honest, the fact that 2016 was declared as “The International Year of Pulses” by UN gave me an idea on my research project.
My personal interests have been somehow similar too. When I joined a product development competition in 2015 in a group of five, I had never thought about insects as edible human food (shame on me). So, there was the challenge for us to use insects as an ingredient to develop a food product for a target country that is struggling with a specific nutrition problem. The more I read about insects as food, the more I was delighted. Insects could change the future if we could overcome our taboos and start consuming them.
The world`s population is estimated to be over 9 billion by 2050. The demand to several foods such as meat and meat products is increasing every year and in order to meet the food demand by 2050 we have to produce around %70 more food than we produce today. It is very challenging to reach that. Therefore, as the people of the world, we have to implement some new habits. These habits should include being more aware of food waste and try to reduce it, being more open-minded about genetically modified organisms (GMOs), reduce our meat consumption and start eating insects! However, this is not easy. Western societies see entomophagy primitive and disgusting. Unfortunately, the “west” is affecting the habits of the developing countries. That is why fast-food has become so popular in the last 20 years, and that is why when a family is getting better economically in a traditionally insect-eating society, they would start buying meat instead of continue eating insects as a sign of “development”.
When sushi was new to the US, most people were not happy with the idea of eating raw fish. Now, the high-end restaurants are the places to have good sushi. Therefore, I am not hopeless. I think an initiative just like UN’s “International Year of Pulses”, which made people aware of the advantages of legume-eating, could help us better educate the new generations and raise a public that have open minds about insect eating, and are aware of the outcomes of some habits, such as carnivorousness. If we can implement a similar business plan that can combine educational institutes (schools, colleges, or even kindergartens), governmental and non-governmental organizations, and private companies to come up with an educational program, we can change how the young ones see the world. Change starts in one`s mind and children are ore more open to new ideas than adults. ‘As the twig is bent, so grows the tree’ and we should take advantage of this for a better future.
