Cycles

This project explores practices of home-farming claiming to be sustainable and environmentally sound. I am interested in entomophagy (eating insects). Mass (and over) production of meat and the waste, the unnecessary use of farmland for breeding cattle, and the following release of pollutants might force humans to search for new sources of proteins. Insects (a daily source of proteins for many non-Western cultures) might become a necessary alternative to meat consumption. But how do we overcome our prejudices? and how sustainable is such practice in a world dominated by practices based on maximizing profits by means of surplus production?

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Belgium Takes a Serious Look at the Food Safety of Insects BY NEWS DESK | JANUARY 28, 2015

http://www.foodsafetynews.com/2015/01/belgium-takes-a-serious-look-at-insects-as-protein-source/#.VUzj23D3arX

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A website dedicated to Entomophagy - edible insects, insects as food, how insects are entering the mainstream as feed and food, and many other insect topics

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Interesting infographic of most common edible insects around the world 

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cricket reactor by Jakub Dzamba

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more from Katharina Unger

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FARM 432 : INSECT BREEDING : this is yet another design project by Katharina Unger that claims to provide a sustainable and clean application for the breeding and consumption of insects  

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Overview of the Micro Air Vehicles Project

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Here is an updates on my previous cricket  post. it explained how it was made.

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what you can do with darkling beetles!!! Biodegradable plastic by Aagje Hoekstra. article here

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I came across Tiny-Farms, a company that claims to  address "a growing and evolving global market in entomophagy" with a mission to introduce this practice into the common household by distributing a set of what they call "open source kits" to initiate and develop insect farms for human and animal consumption. Desire or reality? Considering the recent multiplying of news we have seen  in mainstream and non-mainstream media, it looks like the interest towards insects is, at the very least, increasing. Even the Daily Mail dedicated an article on Tiny Farms

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a beautiful cricket orchestra. The author claims that if played at human speed, crickets deliver this soothing melody. Soon after the news went viral, many had already tried to disprove it, citing personal and scientific evidence. But the point here is not much whether or not the cricket orchestra is the product of a real scientific experiment. the work, and the poetry it creates, speaks to the subtle, yet unavoidable thread that binds the human and the human imagination, to the insect world, be this thread constituted by technology, interspecies bond or imagination. 

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The Museum for Insects

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Entomophagy wars

You can tell the success of a movement when people start fighting for credits and big funds. 

"...A team of McGill MBA students pitching a plan to transform insects into a viable food source has won a prestigious prize that came with $1-million to help their project along." 

see this quite vicious dispute (and here) between a team of graduate students at McGill University and their colleague also at McGill over a patented intellectual property the latter claims to have been breached. It's all about cricket farms...

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entomophagy photo sets on Flickr

and more here 

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mealworms beer bread ...a bit bitter, maybe too many mealworms, maybe the beer was too hoppy 

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Entomophagy experiments: Weaver Ant eggs thai recipe  delish experience! 

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Recently, I couldn't help noticing a number of skillfully design projects to promote human consumption of insects. Lepsis is one of my favorite. While I find it rather problematic that in order to be convinced to become more sustainable eaters, we Westerners need to indulge in  more unsustainable practices (i.e. buy insect growing engines packaged in sleek design), I think  Mansour Ourasanah's project has definitely some merits.