Starvation-threatened Africans are being encouraged to eat insects by a UK aid initiative.
African caterpillars, migratory locusts and black soldier flies are on the menu under the initiative taking place in Zimbabwe and the Democratic Republic of Congo - but locals are rejecting the offer due to the taste and cultural norms.
Dr Alberto Fiore, the project lead who has whipped up a dish of locally farmed mopane worms, cereals, and fruits, has also created a insect-based porridge containing grains including sorghum and millets, which he reassured the Guardian is palatable.
The developing world doesn’t even come close to the level of environmental destruction that the developed world is doing. Like, the disparity is staggering, if you ever actually looked at the data. Almost as staggering as the disparity in wealth, resources, social mobility, and quality of life. Until the developed world has done everything they possibly can to alleviate their own environmental burden, which we aren’t even close to, maybe don’t go making the developing world more miserable.
As for eating insects, the developed eats far more environmentally destructive meat like beef than the developing world. If we ate insects, or better yet, just plants, it would do WAY more for the environment than Africans.
I’m not at all opposed to Africans pitching in toward sustainability. I’m extremely opposed to the West telling them to do so while they live in environmentally unsustainable luxury and takes none of their own advice. If you’re not also eating insects for the environment, it’s pretty fucked up to tell people poorer and more miserable than you that they have to, and I’m 99% sure whichever asshole wrote that paper had steak and lobster the night it was published.
We talked AT LENGTH about this in actual environmental science class because the profs acknowledge that way too many people in the developed world blame the developing world.
Look, I don’t disagree in general, but you are just as much of an armchair pundit as you make this strawman of a researcher from the UK sound like.
Much more likely this was simply a research project done that showed the (indisputable) environmental benefits of utilizing insect protein for human consumption and suggested it to people from DRC, because, you know… their direct neighbors in Uganda are already consuming insect protein in large quantities.
Greetings from Africa btw…