Save the Lemurs! Eat the Crickets!

You, my friend, are living through a food revolution. In labs across the world, researchers are growing meat from just a handful of animal cells or engineering striking imitations of meat, including an entirely plant-based burger that bleeds. Human eaters are also starting to appreciate a rich protein source crawling around right under our noses: crickets. People have eaten bugs for millennia, but the Western world forgot that until recently. Companies are now racing to turn crickets into the (lucrative) future of food.

One group of researchers and conservationists, though, thinks it can also use edible insects to save endangered mammals.

Cricket agriculture means more water for human consumption and more land that’s dedicated to growing food for humans instead of cows. And a bag of cricket powder keeps a whole lot better than a cut of beef, plus it’s more versatile … also far more scalable than traditional livestock, given how little land it requires to manufacture.

Whether edible insects actually take the pressure off endangered lemurs, humans the world over are coming around to the fact that if we want to keep having a world, edible insects are going to be on the menu.

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