10 Foods You Should Eat But Don’t

Unexpected Proteins

According to the World Bank, humans have to produce “at least 50% more food to feed 9 billion people by 2050”. Factors like climate change and the depletion of natural resources at “unprecedented rates” means that unless we change the way we grow and eat food, food is going to become an expensive scarcity.

That’s a pretty frightening thought.

It takes a lot of land, water, and food to raise the animals we’ve all been accustomed to eating. And growing population numbers don’t make this easier.

So researchers started to look for other viable sources of easy-to-raise protein that don’t harm the environment in the process.

6. Crickets and Grasshoppers…Really

The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization believes that eating bugs such as water beetles, grasshoppers, caterpillars, crickets, and yes, even worms, may actually help world hunger numbers decrease.

Bring on the bugs! Am I right?

Probably not.

See, even though people have been eating insects all over the world for centuries, so much so that some of them even consider insects to be a delicacy, most Westerners are just not that into the whole insect thing. Like, at all.

I think we need to get over our squeamishness because despite our total aversion to them, insects really have it going on with the nutrition thing.

Get this: “The average insect is around half protein by dry weight, with some insects (such as locusts) up to about 75% protein”.

So insects could be considered a stable source of high protein. Check out this nutrition label for around half a cup of cooked mealworms and the same serving size of crickets.

You read that right.

There’s close to 60 grams of protein in about 3.5 ounces of crickets. Yes, those tiny little bugs that chirp at night, they have over double the amount of protein found in a cooked t-bone steak (22 g).

The environmental aspect of eating bugs is awesome too. Bugs don’t need big slaughterhouses and they live on garbage and waste, so they would actually be helping the environment.

If eating insects sounds like your thing, the preferable way of enjoying these bugs is cooking them properly with high heat. It’s not uncommon to see critters deep fried and crispy or barbecued and doused in seasoning, or even added to high-heat stir-frys.