I cannot say for sure whether dark forces are truly attempting to get us to eat less beef and start eating insects instead. It could be so. It could also be a conspiracy theory. Or, it could be a joke..However, it is not inconceivable. I have a son who as a toddler ate a beetle. (And lived. He now has children of his own.).Furthermore, Canada actually does produce crickets commercially. Lots of them. Here in Manitoba, I even know somebody who finds our local Manitoba crickets delicious. So whether conspiracy or joke or a really excellent ground-floor business opportunity, let's look at the facts, starting with Canada’s annual protein production:.Beef: 1.35 million metric tons.Pork: 2.28 million metric tons.Chicken: 1.30 million metric tons.Turkey: 0.1578 million metric tons.Fish & shellfish: 0.171 million metric tons.Crickets: 13,000 metric tons that London, Ontario entrepreneur Aspire “hopes to produce," on 12 acres..In other words, there are plans afoot for crickets to become about one quarter of one per cent (0.247%) of Canada's total meat production. And Aspire has federal funding of $8.5 million to get this going..So, are there challenges?.For a start, that works out to about $650 per kilogram, which still leaves beef tenderloin with a small price advantage. (Although, here in Manitoba the unsubsidized cricket variety is a mere $133/kg.) But not to worry. Inflation being what it is, beef will catch up soon enough. Meanwhile, what’s a government for?.But hold on. That's just the good news. There's also some bad. It seems these little critters don't do well in captivity. In 35% of Europe's insect farms, the crickets are diseased. Diseases carried by insects, transmissible to us humans, include malaria, dengue fever, yellow fever, encephalitis, bubonic plague, pneumonic plague, septicemic plague, typhoid fever, cholera, shigella, Eschericia coli variants, Lyme disease, sleeping sickness, and trypanosomiasis. But perhaps crickets are immune to most of these, carrying only cricket paralysis virus, E. coli, Salmonella, and worms. Not a problem if your immune system hasn’t been compromised by COVID spike protein. .It raises the question though: Do we expect the Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) and Health Canada to protect Canadians better than Europeans protect themselves? Interestingly, Manitoba’s Agriculture web pages don’t even mention insects as a food source, let alone indicate if our Manitoba cricket farms are regulated. .Of course, the enthusiasts are still keen. Cricket health can be managed. The key to good cricket health, it seems, is to "keep the crickets’ bin at a consistent 86 degrees Fahrenheit [30degC].” That will be a good trick during a Canadian winter without fossil fuels. But we should try... After all, crickets “produce 50% less greenhouse gases and ammonia" than their competitors. (That ignores keeping them warm, unfortunately.) And, “right now, beef still provides the biggest dose of protein... But with more research and breeding, there's no doubt the nutritional value of crickets will soon catch up.”.Hmm. From idea to productive reality is a long slog. Consider the imminent conversion of California to electric cars and trucks without adequate electric power to run them. Maybe someday (some millennium?) we’ll capture all of the sun’s energy with a Dyson sphere but for now, 0.000000045% is the most we can get, assuming we cover the whole Earth, including oceans, with solar panels and live under them. It’s true we’re making progress, with solar panel efficiency up to 20% (which means 80% of the sun’s energy they receive becomes heat.) That brings us down to 0.000000009%. But we’d better hurry: Our Sun is almost half way there to its explosion as a supernova, a mere 5 billion years from now.).Also, insects are fed “grains, vegetable by-products”, and so may be competing with humans for food. What does a cricket taste like? Whatever it eats. In the case of Aspire’s crickets, "...they will be fed a rich plant diet.” You can feed your crickets with special crickets’ food starting at $160/kg..Note that they do eat meat. Perhaps the New York Times story promoting cannibalism shows a way. Crickets are one step towards Soylent Green (coincidentally?) placed in the year 2022. “A cricket’s diet consists mainly of dead animals which makes it very easy for them to pick up parasites and therefore easy for them to carry and spread disease.”.The perfect ecological cycle..Or, the perfect joke, at the taxpayers' expense.
