Insects as a way forward
At Latinlingua we love traditions, cultures and all things health-related. Entomophagy is like a trifecta: eating bugs you can explore other cultures, take better care of our planet and give our bodies better nutrition.
As humans, our relationship with insects (like with anything) is largely determined by where and how we were raised. Some cultures include insects in their daily diets, some consider them a delicacy, others see them as plain gross or like an unwanted last-resort in a post-apocalyptic world.
With the Covid-19 pandemic putting a halt to our “normal” lives, we connected with the real possibility of including bugs in our diet (adding to the more than 2 billion people in the planet that already do). It’s a way to ease the pressure on our planet (one third of the land goes to growing animal feed for cows, pigs and chicken), improve the quality of the protein that we ingest and reconnect ourselves with the natural life-death cycle from which we have long departed as city dwellers outsourcing the hunting and raising our kids to believe that we are not predators or that meat magically appears in plastic wrapping at the super.
Bugs can be raised by almost anyone (go self-sufficiency!) in vertical farms (go space savings!), in or near the place of consumption (go lower carbon footprint!), they consume far less water (go resource optimization!), are nutrient dense (go healthy eating!), can be used as high-protein flour (go convenience!) and are tasty when well prepared (go indulgence!).
Have you tried bugs? Would you? We’ll be diving deeper into this initiative and logging our journey here (starting with Ignacio, our co-founder and CEO who’s already setting up his home mealworm (tenebrio molitor) farm).
Make sure to watch the documentary The Gateway Bug to see what’s being done in the world to drive insect-eating.
Reach out if you’d like to share the road ahead towards including insects in our diet. It’s sure to be an interesting one 🙂